How to Set up The Strongest Easy to Remember Password

Recently the Yahoo’s security breach took the news by storm. The incident compelled its millions of users to question it’s reliability & this brings us to our topic of what, as an end user, should we do to fortify our online accounts.

Here we will discuss what makes our online accounts vulnerable & how we can ensure utmost security of them.

What most of us do:

While setting passwords for social media or email accounts, to meet the required criteria, we use both lower as well as upper case letters in combination with digits. But what most of us don’t notice is, simply capitalizing the first letter or adding numbers at the end doesn’t make it hard to crack. Rather adding birth dates or ages makes it an easy guess.

Recent studies by Nicolas Christin et al. of Carnegie Mellon University found that majority of the users used passwords like ‘Newspaper123’, which being an usual practice leaves passphrase vulnerable.

Also many believed that words that are harder to spell are harder for the attackers to guess, being unaware of the mostly automated attacks. When a password database is compromised attackers don’t type user guesses; they use word lists.

                                    So keeping these in view, setting up the safest password seems kind of a holy grail for all of us. However, if we use some simple tricks, we actually can create an invulnerable password for our account, keeping it easy to remember.

Use of rhyming poems:

Researchers at University of California have found that using poems as passphrases makes it next to impossible to crack. And such passwords are easy to memorize as well. In fact these are unusual combination of words. You can use passwords similar to these :-

•      A losing party paralyzed

•      Elisa Anthrax stabilized

•      A Kurdish scarring televised

•      Providers closely supervised

Being poetic to set up a password may sound a little odd, but according to a University of Southern California scholar Kevin Knight, it would take around 5 million years at current speeds, to crack such a poetic password.

Again if you find it difficult to create a password poem for yourself, then you can get it done through these links below.

Link 1 | Link 2

The same researchers, Marja & Kevin Knight have made a system that can create such a passphrase for you & once it is sent to your email, the same passphrase is immediately deleted from their server.

Capitalization & Symbols:

Studies show that using unusual capitalization & uncommon symbols to randomize the password for security can be greatly effective. You can use small yet unbreakable passwords with this technique. Some of the examples you can refer to are:

“7AXEliot<”

“12BSBreak\”

Two Factor Authentication:

This method has proven to be very reliable & robust for any kind of circumstances. Heather Kelly of CNN writes, adding a second line of authentication like OTP sent as text message or generated by an app can greatly secure your accounts online.

After the breach, Yahoo has been encouraging people to use its innovative two step authenticating tool, Yahoo Account Key, to even set aside the need to remember a password.

So we would recommend you to go for this feature where available.

Along with these techniques, we would also encourage you not to reuse a password ever, for utmost security.

Conclusion:

Even if these steps sound like going one step further for securing your accounts, we would very likely suggest these. So that the next time you get a news on extensive data breach, you won’t repent for not doing it.

Do let us know about any other ideas you have, to create passwords that are strong and easy to remember, by commenting below. Do share it with your friends.