Making a secure password

For a good password, you need something that is memorable so that you can remember it, but at the same time it needs to be secure so that hackers are kept out of your systems.

These two requirements seem to be mutually exclusive but it is possible to create a memorable but uncrackable password.

To keep the hackers out then passwords need to be:-

• Long - The longer a password is, the harder it is for the password to be cracked (8 to 20 characters is a good length)
• Mixed - Using a mixture of upper and lower case, numbers and special characters make passwords resistant to every know form of cracking attempt.
• Nonsensical - This is what keeps your password unguessable.

How to make a good password 

So that your password is memorable come up with a phrase that you can remember for example:-

• A rhyming couplet like poor-white-dog-bite
• Or something that you can visualise like Frozen banana in my shoe
• Repeating phrases like 2bitter@2bitter.com can work too.
• If you have to have a shorter password then choose a phrase and use some letters from it. For instance, a password like mhallifwwas seems hard until you realise that is composed of the first letters from "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow".

Ideally your password should contain a mix of letters and numbers. You can think of one and then just change, your phrase in some way so that it has a mixture of characters for instance make every 5th character a capital letter and swop the spaces for a number or some other special character.

Once you have a password that you can remember and meets the secure criteria, there is only one more thing you need to remember.

Never write it down