Programs that use automated databases can perform a dictionary assault on your system, identifying the password easily. However, humans aren’t your only concern. These are simple words that can be easily guessed by a user. It’s also pathetically weak - as are ’default’ and ’blank’. The word 'Password' is the most commonly used password. Let’s look at a few examples of weak passwords to understand why these put you at risk: It uses common words, like “Password” To understand the definition of a strong password, it’s best to go over common practices that put millions of users at risk on a daily basis. Creating them can actually be fun - and your payoff in increased safety is huge. Learning a few simple skills will make creating strong memorable passwords easy. The secret is to make passwords memorable but hard to guess. The good news is you don’t have to memorize awful strings of random letters numbers and symbols in order to incorporate all of these aspects into your passwords. You simply need a few tricks. The key aspects of a strong password are length (the longer the better) a mix of letters (upper and lower case), numbers, and symbols, no ties to your personal information, and no dictionary words. With activities like personal banking and retirement increasingly migrating online, the stakes continue to rise. But passwords that are too easy to remember can be easy to guess or to ascertain with a brute-force attack.

Passwords you can't remember are useless. Is your state cyber secure? Or is it one of the most hackable? Find out in our Cyber Hygiene Risk report. Or, if you made hard to remember passwords (probably because your business or a website forced you to) then you likely have a list of the passwords right next to your computer - even though you know this also compromises your safety if others use your computer. Or you use several passwords, but they are all short simple words or include numbers that relate to your life they are still too easy to guess. Anyone would be overwhelmed if they had to create and memorize multiple passwords like Wt4e-79P-B13^qS.Īs a result, you may be using one identical password even though you know it’s unsafe and that if it gets compromised all of your web information is exposed. You could then input each of those numbers at different places in your password.Creating strong passwords may seem like a daunting task, especially when the recommendation is to have a unique password for each site you visit. Count SomethingĪ memorable way to keep varying the numbers you use in your passwords is to count up the vowels or consonants that appear in the name of the service. Now, this is what happens when you put them together: Here's an example of some random numbers and special characters:Īnd here's one of the transformed password we created: You could add this string to the end, but it's best to weave it throughout your password instead. The simplest way to add numbers and special characters to your passwords is to memorize a random string of them that you use in every password. Here are the most creative ideas for adding numbers and symbols to your passwords. However, you might want to combine this with another transformation method to make sure your password isn't too simple.

You could choose to reverse each word or reverse only one of them. This is a simple way to transform your password so it doesn't use words found in the dictionary. I can remove the first three letters from each word to create:ĮOsmithColate 8. Other creative ideas include removing every other letter, removing all but the first and last letters, or only using the first letter from each word in your password. If you have a particularly long base password, you could remove the first three letters from each word. Now I'll move all the vowels to the end of each word to transform it:įrieRsmthaeoiChcltooae 7. Instead, why not remove every other vowel, move vowels to the end of the word, or replace every a with an e? You could remove the vowels from your base password, but that's a little obvious.

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