The sad fact is, the greater our dependence on the internet grows, the stronger the likelihood that we will be hacked. This is why you are cautioned to use unique passwords for each site – if one is hacked, the rest of your internet history and important sites are not affected.
While creating nonsensical passwords for each important site may be annoying, that annoyance is nothing compared to what you will encounter and experience if your accounts – your online bank accounts, PayPal, and the jumbo Social Media sites – are compromised.
Take a break from network TV one of these nights to cook up a list of passwords that will provide a reasonable level of safety.
The easy-as-pie, hack-resistant password recipe:
- Pick a song lyric, or a book title. Any song or book will do. For this example, we will use “Baby I was Born this Way” by Lady Gaga. Convert it to an acronym by taking the first letter of each word: BIWBTW.
- Pick two or three of your favorite punctuation symbols. You might use #^&, for example.
- Finish with some numbers – but not a series. Use 492, but not 456. Now rearrange the segments however you choose.
The first password, using this example, is BIWBTW#^&492. Please don’t use it, make your own. You can switch the order around, of course, so maybe you use #^&BIWBTW492, or for sites that require upper and lowercase letters, 492BiWbTw#^&.
Keep going! If you do just five each night for an entire week, you will quickly turn every password in your list to something as close to hack-proof as you can get.