Whenever it comes to maintaining personal information and the security of personal accounts, you are advised to choose a strong password for your account, but it’s almost never said about how you should do it. In this article, we will explain to you how to choose a strong password so that you can also easily memorize it.
In the digital world, you always need a credential to prove your identity. This credential consists of two parts, a username and a password. In this article, we won’t talk about the mechanism for verifying users’ credentials, but we focus on creating a secure credential, which is extremely difficult to crack and discover for hackers.
Typically, you have complete freedom to choose a username, unless another user has already chosen your desired title. In such cases, the very system that you are creating the account on usually offers some suggestions, but it’s better you already have a few proper َalternative usernames. The username introduces you to the system to prepare for the next element, i.e., checking your passwords. The username itself does not have high security sensitivity. For example, the first part of your email address is actually your username in the service. However, it’s a good idea to keep your username secret, as long as it’s really needed.
Create a password
To create a strong password that is hard to guess or crack for hackers, you have two general ways. The first option is using tools or online services that create random and complex passwords for you. The result will be a very strong passphrase, but on the other hand, memorizing such passwords would be as difficult. If you decide to use this method, you can use a passwords management program to store your passwords secretly so you don’t have to memorize them. Note that writing a password on paper to avoid forgetting it, is not an option.
In the second method, you can easily create a powerful password by keeping some simple points in mind, and you can easily memorize it. Before creating a password, consider the following:
– Your password must be sufficiently long. Today, most of the services in which you create an account require you to choose a word that has at least eight characters; we recommend 10 characters as an absolute minimum, but strict security experts don’t satisfy with anything less than 12 to 14 characters.
– Your password should not contain one or few “dictionary” words. Simply put, your password should not be readable. For example, you should never select a phrase like “father son” as a password. Such passwords will readily compromise against dictionary-based hack attacks.
– Use upper/lower-case characters, numbers and symbols in your password. Try to have all these elements in your password because the more variation you make, the more powerful it will be.
– Do not use obvious alternatives. For example, the use of two zeros in the G00GLE statement does not make it much more complicated. We will continue to tell you how best to use these alternatives.
The process of creating a password
Consider a relatively long English sentence with a length of at least 10 words. You can choose such a sentence from any source you like, the first sentence of a book, a quotation from a famous person, or even a translation of a Persian sentence. The most important point is that you can remember this sentence. Suppose we chose “we try to create our strongest password for gmail account”.
Now write the first letters of this sentence. In the case of our chosen sentence, the result will be the word “wttcospifga”. Well, here we have an 11-character password, which is not easy to guess, but we’re not finished yet. Well, we might be able to make this a little more complex with a few symbols. How about replacing the first “t” character with “+” and using “!” instead of the “i” character. This way, our password will look something like “w+tcosp!Fga”.
Now we go to numbers. Let’s replace the character “o” with the number “0” and the character “g” with the number “6” (because of its similarity to the character G). As a result, our password is converted to “w+tc0sp!F6a”. Rest assured that breaking such a password for a hacker is not easy at all. To go one step further, we write the first, middle, and last letters of the phrase in upper case: “W+tc0Sp!F6A”.
Note that this is just an example and you can use the above methods in the way you want to create your password. But without a doubt, by entering the result in the Password field, you will receive a high degree of security through the registration form of each service. On the other hand, you just have to remember the main sentence, because when you convert it to your password, you know which method you used to transform each character.
With some practice, you can easily find out how to write your password and change it. Note, however, that regardless of how powerful the passwords you are using in your different accounts, it is recommended to change them Occasionally.
