How many people truly have a secure password? Probably not all that many. In my experience the vast majority of people have pretty insecure passwords, and they use them again….and again…and again. In this day and age everyone needs to learn to have better and more secure passwords.

“I’ll never remember them”

“I have too many passwords I need to remember already”

“You mean ‘password’ isn’t a good password? That’s what came with my router though.”

I’ve looked at a few “how to make your password secure” sites and they never really focus on the main objection people have. They just cover the HOW of making something more obscure, not the “How the fuck am I going to remember all this stuff, I don’t even know my wife’s phone number I just press her name into the cellphone and it dials her.”

I’m going to try and help with that….First the nitty gritty.. of the first how.

1) Make it long. If they allow 16 character passwords, use it. At the very least have them be 10 characters long.

2) If they allow upper and lower case letters use a combination of both.

3) If they allow special characters use at least one. These characters include…

! ” # $ % & ‘ ( ) * + , – . / :
; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

4) Mix and bake 3 hours at 325 degrees.

Ok most places will tell you that, and tell you to make them memorable and there they kind of leave it to die. People look at the special characters, hear “make it memorable” and just glaze like a Krispy Kreme.

Here’s where I come in. Now I’m going to make up an example here, but you’re going to have to semi-personalize it. Don’t over personalize it, you don’t want to use kids names or pets names etc. Also I’m going to show an example cypher here, but you’re going to want to make up your own.

1) Pick something you enjoy that has a sequence of a number of things in it. A book series. Nora Roberts novels. Baseball teams. James Bond movies. Something with more than 10 things in it, and preferably those 10 things all consist of words of more than 10 characters. This is the big key to remembering a bunch of passwords. If they’re all random gobbledygook with alternate characters, these days you need to be a mental magician to not only remember them all, but know where they’re used.

For this example lets go with baseball teams.

2) Now you need to create a cypher. Let’s look at those alternate characters. Now a good hacker will see through an attempt to swap out ‘leetspeak’ terms. So don’t change E’s with 3′s or i’s with 1. But you need some characters to replace vowels. So for instance…

Anytime you use an A use an & instead. Do this for all the vowels, and some consonants as well.

A = &

E = #

I = /

You can even use multiple characters to represent one…

O = ()    <-those are paranthesis

U = >

C = {

T = ~

N = |\|

You’ll have the hardest time remember the cypher at first, but use it a bit and it’ll become second nature very soon.

3) Make your first password. Ok so we’re going to use baseball teams.

Boston Red Sox

now apply the cypher

B()s~()|\|R#dS()x

eh voila. a secure password. If you memorized your cypher which you will very quickly just by using the password regularly, you’ll be able to then make more

Pittsburgh Pirates

P/~~sb>rghP/r&~#s

Then just have all your passwords be baseball teams. If it helps to remember which ones, you can do them alphabetically, but since you already KNOW the sequence of teams you’re most likely to actually remmeber the sequence of teams you use. Then knowing your cypher you now have 30 passwords of strong quality you can use and you’ll be able to easily remember them.

Of course whether ~&mp&B&yR&ys or &~l&|\|~&Br&v#s opens your bank account really still is up to you to remember.