How many accounts do you have across the Internet?
How many different passwords do you have?
The answer to both of those questions should be one in the same. The truth is that the majority of us only have a handful of passwords we use for all of our online accounts. I’m giving you some quick and easy advice on creating secure passwords you can remember.
Why should I have a unique password for every website?
The short answer is it will save you time and possibly money. There are numerous ways that your password for a particular site can be stolen – then that password or password hash will be passed around, encrypted, decrypted, compared, declared, hung up, and all kinds o’ mean nasty ugly things. If you have used that same password for all your other accounts, now they are all vulnerable. So when your Facebook password (that you probably have saved in your browser) matches your amazon account which matches your email password which matches your brokerage account… you’re gonna have a bad time.
But I don’t have time to remember those crazy random passwords!
You don’t have to. A great method to create a secure password is to use a pass phrase of 3 or more words. The phrase should be something not linked directly to you or your immediate interests. Uncommon and slang words work even better. For example: “fluffy is puffy” or “penguins have beaks”. Spaces are okay to use. Many sites require uppercase, numbers and punctuation in their passwords. That is easy to add: “Fluffy is my #1 Puffy?” or “Penguins have 3 Beaks!”
We now have our new pass phrase. How do we make all those different passwords? One method is tack on a word or an abbreviation that is related to the website we are at. If we are on Facebook we might use: “fluffy is puffy facebook” or “penguins have beaks facebook”. This way we have a pass phrase to use as a base (that we can remember) and an additional word related to the website to build a unique password for all your accounts.
You now have a unique secure password for each site. Not only is it easy to remember, it is also faster to type out on a mobile device.
But you don’t have to believe me. There are many others who will say the same. Thomas Baekdal has a great article discussing this method in more detail. Another fun site to test out your new password phase is GRC’s Interactive Brute Force Password “Search Space” Calculator.’
Sources:
http://www.baekdal.com/insights/the-usability-of-passwords-faq
https://xkcd.com/936/