While it may seem tough to do this, there are a few simple tips that can make it easy. Note: the examples below illustrate just the concepts being discussed. No single technique should be used on its own, but rather should be used with other techniques. The combination of several will produce a strong password. You want to choose something that is easy to remember with a minimum of 8 characters that uses as many of the techniques above as possible.
One way to do this is to pick a phrase you will remember, pick all the first or last letters from each word and then substitute some letters with numbers and symbols. You can then apply capitals to some letters perhaps the first and last, or second to last, etc.
You could also perhaps keep or add punctuation. This approach has good and bad points. This is a very important part of password strength. For example, a 12 character password has the potential to be quite a bit stronger than an 8 character password.
Lastly, make sure to use a good mixture of characters in your password. A lengthy character set with a lengthy password is no good if you have the same character repeated over and over as a password. The majority of websites will allow you to use most if not all characters on your keyboard, but it is up to you to actually use a good variety.
An optimal password will contain a mixture of lowercase letters, uppercase letters, digits, and symbols. We have a ready-made password generator tool that generates unique and almost impossible to crack passwords. Alternatively, you should follow our top tips and ideas on how to setup a good password:. Our own secure password generator will create a sequence of random characters.
Copy and use it as a password for your device, email, social media account, or anything else that requires private access. So instead of choosing a word, pick a phrase and take the first letters, numbers and punctuation from that phrase to generate a seemingly random combination of characters.
You can even substitute the first letter of a word with a number or symbol to make it even more secure. Or try swapping out words for punctuation like we used to back in the days of text slang, if you can remember back that far. A popular method for choosing a password is to open a dictionary or book and choose a random word. But, as random as it may seem to you, a single word is actually quite easy for a hacker to guess.
So rather than opting for just one word from the dictionary, choose a few and string them together along with numbers and symbols to make it much trickier for someone to figure out. If you want to add symbols to your passwords without making them harder to remember, you can always use emoticons.
But, rather than starting the whole process again, you could simply add a different code into your password for each online account. If you want to remember your password, it can be a good idea to practise typing it several times over. A secure password manager generates, stores and manages all your passwords in one safe online account.
This is really useful because it allows you to use as many unique passwords as you like without ever having to worry about memorising them. This means you only have to remember one strong password as opposed to every single one. A secure password manager will fill all this in for you. Here are some of the best password managers in This attack is exactly what it sounds like — the hacker is essentially attacking you with a dictionary.
That most loathsome of tactics — phishing — is when cybercriminals try to trick, intimidate, or pressure you through social engineering into unwittingly doing what they want.
It will direct you to click a link, which takes you to a phony website built to resemble your credit card company. Once you do, they have it. Phishing scams can try to ensnare you through phone calls too. Be leery of any robocall you get claiming to be about your credit card account. Now that we know how passwords are hacked, we can create strong passwords that outsmart each attack though the way to outsmart a phishing scam is simply not to fall for it.
Your password is on its way to being uncrackable if it follows these three basic rules. Stay away from the obvious. Come up with unique passwords that do not include any personal info such as your name or date of birth. Avoid these top 10 weak passwords. Keeping in mind the nature of a brute force attack, you can take specific steps to keep the brutes at bay:.
The key to staving off this type of attack is to ensure the password is not just a single word. Multiple words will confuse this tactic — remember, these attacks reduce the possible number of guesses to the number of words we might use to the exponential power of the number of words we are using, as explained in the popular XKCD post on this topic.
At Avast, we know a thing or two about cybersecurity. We know what makes a solid password, and we have our favorite methods to create them. The methods below give you some good password ideas to create your own strong, memorable passwords.
This is the multiple word phrase method with a twist — choose bizarre and uncommon words. Use proper nouns, the names of local businesses, historical figures, any words you know in another language, etc. A hacker might guess Quagmire, but he or she would find it ridiculously challenging to try to guess a good password example like this:.
While the words should be uncommon, try to compose a phrase that gives you a mental image. This will help you remember. To crank it up another notch in complexity, you can add random characters in the middle of your words or between the words. This method is also described as the "Bruce Schneier Method. Make sure the sentence you choose is as personal and unguessable as possible.
Each of these can help with better and more secure authentications. A password manager keeps track of all of your passwords and does all the remembering for you, except for one thing — the master password which grants you access to your password manager.
For that big kahuna, we encourage you to use every tip and trick listed above. The programs also come with generators, such as the Avast Random Password Generator shown below, so you can create super-complicated, extra-long passwords that are infinitely more difficult to crack than any passwords a human might come up with.
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