Netier - IT Service Providers Canberra

How to Create a Strong Password

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Everyone is always told that they need to create strong passwords for their computers or other applications but would you believe that the top five most common passwords are:

  1. password
  2. 123456
  3. 12345678
  4. 1234
  5. qwerty

The main reason that these passwords are used is because we have a lot of passwords and it’s really hard to remember them all.  Here are a few tips for creating strong passwords that can be remembered easily.

Strong passwords should have the following characteristics:

  1. It should have a combination of numbers, capitals and special characters
  2. Have a different password for each account you use (never mix personal and work passwords)
  3. Use two factor authentication whenever possible
  4. Use a secure password manager such as Passwordstate and Lastpass

With all of the above in mind, here are some tips on creating strong passwords that are easy to remember:

  1. Take the first letter of a favourite song, book or movie.  So if you are a fan of The Fast and the Furious 2 you could start with “Tfatf2”
  2. You can then increase the complexity of the password by swapping letters for numbers (zero for O or 3 for e or 1 for l’s).  In this case we will swap the t for a 7 so we now have “Tfa7f2”
  3. We now need to look at adding a special character or two.  We can swap the “a” for @ and add a ! to the end so our password is now “Tf@7f2!”
  4. Ideally we want at least 8 characters so we have a couple of options to make it longer:
  5. The movie came out in 2003 so you could just add that to the end to be “Tf@7f2!2003”
  6. It was also called 2 Fast 2 Furious so you could add those first letters and get “Tf@tf2!2F2F
  7. You could also turn it into a phrase “Tf@tf2!istheb3st”

If this is still too hard to remember, then you could look at using the registration number of our car still mixing up capitalisation of letters and adding a few special characters or if that is still too much look at getting a secure password manager which can not only store passwords but also generate them for you as well.