HOW TO CREATE A STRONG AND MEMORABLE PASSWORD

Do you realize that your digital life is almost protected with passwords? Just think about how you log into your computer. You turn it on and soon you are required to type in your password to access it. How do you sign into your email account? You browse the website or open the app of your favorite email provider and soon you are presented with a log in form where you type in your User ID and Password. And how do you log into your social network accounts? It is the same process.

What about when you independently want to protect your information? Let us say you want to protect your information stored on a hard drive or flash drive by cryptography. You protect the information with a password.

Simply, Password is a secret word used for authenticating if a user is really whom he/she is claiming to be, prior to accessing a computer system or information. Usually, a password is combined with a user id or username as a mechanism of accessing a computer system, and it can be used alone when independently protecting a hard drive or flash drive or when the user id is already known and what is required is merely a password to prove the user’s identity.

Now, you understand what a password is and how important it is to you? I hope you do! It is the key to your digital life. And what do think once it falls into the wrong hands? — I mean cybercriminals. Your digital life could be ruined in many ways. Your information could be stolen or damaged so that that they are no longer accessible. Your accounts could be hijacked and be used to carry out illegal activities in your identity — just to name a few.

Some people use easy guessable passwords when they are required to create passwords for accessing their accounts, computers or computing resources. These easy passwords include their names, relatives’ names, childrens’ names, pets’ names, dates of birth, country names, or any word that is found in a dictionary such as umbrella, security, protection, or simply, they may also use 123, 124, or 123456 as their password. Cybercriminals can easily guess these passwords and take over your accounts or steal your information. So, you should not use them.

Let us check how long it would take a cybercriminal to crack some of these passwords. According to Kaspersky Lab Secure Password Check, It would take the cybercriminal one second to crack this password! “123456” If you still use this kind of password somewhere, it is better for you to change it after reading this article!

Let us also check how long it would take a cyercriminal to crack down a password of a word found in a language dictionary. According to Kaspersky Lab Secure Password Check, It would take the cybercriminal 24 seconds to crack down this password, “umbrella“. So, you should not use any word found in a language dictionary as your password. It is too easy to crack it!

There is a technique that cybercriminals use to discover your password and this technique is called “password cracking”. Simply, password cracking is a process of trying all possible means to figure out a password used for accessing a computer system or information. Password cracking is carried out by using a dictionary attack or a brute-force attack. In a dictionary attack, a file is pre-loaded with passwords such as default passwords used to access computing devices, popular passwords commonly used by a lot of people, and words from language dictionaries in the hope that a user might choose a word found in the dictionary. Then this pre-loaded file is used against the authentication form by comparing each password that contains, to the real password stored as a hash in the database of the computer system until a match is found.

In a brute-force attack, all possible password combinations are compared to the real password stored in the database until a match is found. This means that the real password will eventually be found — it is just a matter of time. That is different from the dictionary attack because only the pre-loaded passwords within the file will be compared to the real password in the database until a match is found. If there is no match at the end of the last pre-loaded password, the password cracking will be failed — the real password will not be found. That is the reason why a dictionary attack is quick — it has an end — when compared to the brute-force attack — it has no end.

On the contrary, in a brute-force attack, there will be every possible combinations of passwords which will be compared to the password stored in the database until the real password used to access the computer system or information is found. That is why it may take a long time to crack the password with this attack if the password is really strong.

So, what is an easy password and a strong password? An easy password is a kind of password which is easy to guess with a dictionary attack and a brute-force attack. While, a strong password is a password which is not guessable with the dictionary attack and not easy guessable with a brute-force attack — the one which it would take many years to crack and no cybercriminal going to spend an year cracking a password! That is why you should know how to create a unique strong memorable password which is crackproof to the cybercriminals.

It has to be unique because it is not a good habit to use the same password for all your accounts because once it is compromised, it is used for taking over all your remaining accounts and to access your computer resources and information while if it were unique, only one account would be compromised. Therefore, you should use a unique strong password for your each separate account or password-protected device.

A strong password is good but when it is not easy to remember, it is worse! You could be tempted to write it down which would put you into trouble when someone malicious finds it. So, you need a unique strong password which is also memorable. The one which will be easy for you to remember. That is the point because a password that you will forget after a couple of hours means nothing.

You can create a strong and memorable password by taking the first letter of each word of your favorite phrase and add a symbol or a number or both — I have used a single quote. Let us take some examples. First, “ My favorite book has 400 pages! ”. Here, the password would be: “ Mfbh400p! ”. According to Kaspersky Lab Secure Password Check, it would take 4 months to crack this password.

Let us make it harder so that it would take years to crack. Just we are going to add a single quote after the exclamation mark, “ Mfbh400p!’ ”. According to Kaspersky Lab Secure Password Check, It would take 4 years to crack this password. So, we have made the password more difficult to crack. Here, we can rest assured that there is no cybercriminal who is going to spend those years cracking one password. It is impossible!

Let us take another example, “ I am the youngest in my family of 6 children! ”. Here, the password would be, “ Iatyimo6c!’ ”. According to Kaspersky Lab Secure Password Check, It would take 33 years to crack this password. This one is really crackproof with an average home computer!

You have seen that these passwords made from your favorite phrases are very strong that no cybercriminal will waste his time to crack them for years. They are crackproof and memorable — you will merely have to remember your favorite phrase and take the first letter of each word plus your favorite symbol.

So, forget about the old-fashioned easy guessable passwords that cybercriminals will easily crack in a couple of seconds and adhere to the security practice of creating strong and memorable passwords that will protect your digital life to the point that you are no longer worried about them getting cracked.

NB: The passwords used in this article are no longer crackproof — they have been merely used for educational purposes. Therefore, you should not use any of them as your password because they have become public and could be cracked easily with a dictionary attack.

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