How do I make my passwords safer?

FourSquare Training Article

How to Create Stronger Passwords and Pins

In today's world we all have many passwords to remember and, in fact, we can't do without them. We need them to access our money, our computers, phone, social media and work. They are a crucial part of our daily existance.

Perhaps as a consequence of us having so many of them to remember, many of our password choices are inherently weak and vulnerable to simple hacking. In fact, we all have a tendancy to choose passwords that are easy to remember because of the significance to us of the words that we choose such as pet names, birthdays, the names of relatives, spouses and so forth.

This makes these common passwords vulnerable to both dictionary-based hacks and, even worse, half of them could even be guessed from your social media profiles.

In fact, according to one 2021 study there is pretty much a pandemic of weak and vulnerable passwords throughout all sectors of industry! See The misfortunate passwords of Fortune 500 companies.

How to Make Memorable Passwords Safer

This simple tip will help make your passwords just that little bit less vulnerable.

Let's say that your favorite dog is a Dalmatian. Its a dictionary word and your social media is probably rammed full of photos of Dalmatians. Because this word has an emotional connnection for you that makes it easy to remember it is an obvious choice for using as a password. The problem is, what makes it memorable for you, makes it very weak in terms of the security of the accounts which you use this password to login to. Any configuration of this word as a password is suddenly very vulnerable no matter how many lower and uppercase combinatons you use or how many numbers or symbols you tack on to the end of it. In short it's an unsafe choice and its not going to protect your personal or private information.

Firstly, let's get our password out of the dictionary. To do this, rather than typing dalmation we are going to use the keys above and to the left of the corresponding letters used in this memory word that we are using for our password. This gives us: eqojq589h. This is going to be our starting point for creating a memorable, but safer and more secure password.

Just using this simple method we have created an easy to remember password which is much more secure, which no one could guess from your social media and which isn't in any dictionary.

You can also use the same method to make your pin numbers more secure, and you can even vary the technique by instead choosing characters to the left, right or to the bottom of those in your memory word. In short you can extend this method to create an infinite number of memorable yet strong passwords. Pick your own system and once you have chosen it keep that system to yourself so that your password system is as private as your passwords themselves.

To add some icing on the cake and make your password even more secure let's use some punctuation characters as well. Since we love dalmatians so much let's add some exclamations:eqojq589h!!

And we can take it one step further by capitalising the first letter: Eqojq589h!!

Of course no password is completely immune to hacking but this one is at least both memorable and much more secure than it could have been.

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