Passwords are like underwear.

We have to use passwords everywhere: online banking, email, social networking, our smartphones, voicemail, our computers – it’s ridiculous how many passwords we have!  So how can we remember them all?

Before I continue, here is an actual password that I need you to remember: “Iw@2815PD@md$h4l”.  Take a minute to memorize it – got it?  Good, let’s continue.

With the pressure of trying to remember all these passwords, many people choose to use the same password or just a few passwords for everything.  Unfortunately, this makes it easy for hackers to break into your online banking if you use the same password for your Facebook account.

I recommend having one unique password for every application that needs one, and a system to keep track of them could be as simple as a password-protected document or spreadsheet.

However, for those of you who only want to remember one or two passwords at a time, here’s one method that I recommend to clients for creating fairly strong, hard-to-guess passwords.

Develop a sentence that includes numbers in some form: a date, an address, etc.  For example: “I work at 2815 Prairie Drive and my dog Shibani has 4 legs.”  The next step is to go through that sentence, pulling out the first letter of each word, keeping the same case, and leaving the numbers as is.  Our password becomes: “Iwa2815PDamdSh4l”.  Many sites, especially online banking sites, now expect you to use symbols, so let’s replace some letters with symbols: “Iw@2815PD@md$h4l”.

Remember that password I made you memorize at the beginning of this article?  It shouldn’t be so hard to remember now.  The key is to develop a sentence that means something *only* to you, paraphrase it using the method above, replace some common letters with symbols, and you have a password that will be near impossible to guess.

On a side note, it will take about three quadrillion years to crack the password that you just memorized, according to http://www.howsecureismypassword.net/.

And how are passwords like underwear?
– They should be changed often.
– The longer they are, the better.
– They should not be shared with friends.
– Don’t leave them lying around in the open.

Isaac Grover is the owner and chief technologist at Quality Computer Services.  When he’s not enveloped in technology, he enjoys being a dad and being involved in the community.