Passwords are a pain!
Passwords are a pain and a right royal one at that!
It’s suggested that, in today’s world, you need about 25 different, secure passwords. There’s no way you’re going to remember that many.
Or is there?
Well there might be…
The key to creating a password that’s easy for you to remember but difficult to crack is to use mnemonics. Huh!
Mnemonics is a $10 word that means “something intended to assist the memory”. Something to help you remember things like lists or passwords.
So how does it work?
Well, if you play music you’ll know: “Every Good Boy Deserves Favours”
This is the mnemonic for the notes on the Treble Clef: E G B D F (more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/
How can you apply it to your passwords?
In your life you have a number of things which are important to you. Things like Names, Dates, Places etc. You can use these to create a mnemonic for a secure password.
For example:
- Brother’s name: Fred
- First Girlfriend: Mary
- Little Sister’s Date of Birth: 23/08/1990
- Daughter’s Name: Helen
- First House Number: 63
- Make of first car: Ford
- Wedding Anniversary: 6/06/2012
- Dog’s name: Charlie
Use the 1st letter or number (“character”) from each one, Capitalise the last letter and add an exclamation mark and you’ve got an easy to remember password that’s quite difficult to guess.
fm2h6f6C!
You can use different combinations of things which are important to you.
You can also use different sequences like the list number for the character or the 1st character if there aren’t enough characters:
fa/e6f0C!
As this is a public site, please don’t use the passwords shown above as everyone now knows them 🙂
Even so that’s still quite a lot to remember. Rather than writing them down or storing them on your mobile phone, both of which are extremely unsafe, use a password manager like RoboForm.
The basic RoboForm is free to use on one computer but, if you have more than one computer and/or a mobile as well, RoboForm Everywhere is £7.95 ($9.95) for the first year then £13.95 ($19.95) thereafter.
Who Thought Passwords were a good Idea? has more information on Password Managers and Passwords in general.
So what about insecure passwords? Are you using one?
If you are using any of these as your password, don’t! Change it now:
1) 123456
2) password
3) 12345678
4) qwerty
5) 12345
6) 123456789
7) football
8) 1234
9) 1234567
10) baseball
11) welcome
12) 1234567890
13) abc123
14) 111111
15) 1qaz2wsx
16) dragon
17) master
18) monkey
19) letmein
20) login
21) princess
22) qwertyuiop
23) solo
24) passw0rd
25) starwars
Who Thought Passwords were a good Idea? has more information on Password Managers and Passwords in general.
I want to help you so, if you have any questions about passwords, please leave them below.
All well and good but remembering them in the right order is not easy, not unless there is a clear chronological order. Plus it means using the same password on all your sites. Don’t like that either.
The thing about a mnemonic is that they have a definite order. When you create it you also decide the order. How you decide the order is entirely up to you though you could use age, or size or any easy to remember order.
If you only need a small number of passwords then mnemonics work very well. Though some people use them to help memorise a large number of items. There’s one person in the UK who uses them to remember a large number of barcodes
Where they really come into their own is when you use a password manager like RoboForm. You only need to remember the mnemonic for that and, as you use it a number of times a day, it’ll be difficult to forget.
I don’t know how you get the idea that you use the same password on multiple sites. Using a mnemonic means just the opposite, you never have to use the same password twice.
You must never use the same password on multiple sites.