A Great Trick To Create A Secure Password That You Won’t Forget

You've heard the warning before that you need to have a secure password for your online sites that isn't easy to guess. "PASSWORD" and "123456" aren't going to cut it. The last thing you want is someone getting into your Facebook, email, or even worse your banking account. Microsoft recommends that you use a password that is at least eight characters long, uses upper and lower case letters, numbers and doesn't contain a complete word. That seems simple enough until you try to remember it!

Here's a trick to create s secure password that you won't forget.

Think of sentence you can easily remember. For example:

Four score and seven years ago

Now use the first letter from each word in that sentence like this and capitalize the first one: Fsasya

Now put a punctuation mark on the end: Fsasya!

Now add a couple of numbers you can remember, like the last two digits of the phone number you had growing up: Fsasya!08

Voila! A secure password that you can easily remember by thinking of Abraham Lincoln shouting the Gettysburg Address over the phone to you when you were a kid.

Want more suggestions? Use a song lyric. Use a line from your favorite movie. Use a line from a Dr. Suess book. You'll find something that will work for you.

So how secure is a password like Fsasya!08?

According to How Secure Is My Password? it would take 275 days for a PC to crack this password. That's not bad. But what happens when you add an underscore at the end like this? Fsasya!08_ 

Now it will take 58 years to crack. You're getting somewhere. The more characters the better.

For the record, one of my passwords is enough characters that it would take 377 billion years to crack with a PC. Try for yourself and see how secure a password would be. I'd recommend you don't use one of your actual passwords, but it will give you an idea of how strong a password could be.