Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to remember secure passwords…
The reason everyone needs strong passwords
Firstly it has been proven that weak passwords are easily guessed by cyber attackers and hacked. Therefore if you want to protect it, the password must be a strong password. Even if you don’t think it needs protecting, you still should use a strong password. This is because any compromised account may be used to gain further access or further information.
An example could be as simple as once a cyber attacker identifies the service, the cyber attacker sends a phishing email impersonating the service with an invoice that matches the real invoice but it also contains a virus that infects the computer.
Even if you use a password manager, remembering a password is still important so you can login to your computer or login to the password manager.
Easy to remember password but hard to guess
The method is simple, take at least four random words from a dictionary and pick one character (e.g. & ) that only you know. The one character will be used between the words. Now you have a strong password. Simple!
To help pick the words you can pick a random page from your home dictionary or use an online service that provides random words:
https://wordunscrambler.me/random-word-generator
Here is an example:
induction&busywork&slash&misaddressing
To increase the strength and security of the password there are many variations and modifications that could be applied. A couple of ways to increase the complexity and security include:
- Adding more words
- Using more than one character between words
- Adding a number at the end
- Removing characters
- Changing the case of some letters
The strong details
So a strong password is about the number of combinations being so large that the ability to try all possibilities is not practical. Now the number of combinations to be “strong” is complicated as it depends on many factors but to simplify it, in this case we will assume anything more than a 12character simple password is deemed strong. So for this method there is 178 thousands words from the English dictionary, and 94 characters on the keyboard. This gives you:
178000^4 x 94 = 9.4364×10²² possible combinations
In comparison a 12 character password with uppercase, lowercase and a number has:
62^12 = 3.226266762×10²¹ possible combinations
So if you are in the market for a strong password you might want to give this method a try.
