Just make sure the password is something you can easily remember and that it is a good solid password.
One of the easiest ways to do this is with your favorite song. For instance, suppose your favorite song is "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion (heh
). Pick your favorite line of that song, then take the first letter of each word to make a string of letters. So in MHWGO, you might pick "Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you", thus making the text string "
EnimdIsyIfy". Be sure to keep the capital letters or feel free to add more (maybe every other letter), as this will make your password more secure by making it case-sensitive. Now find the year that this song was first published and add that to the beginning of the string. So for our example, the string would now be "
1997EnimdIsyIfy". To add the final layer of security, you can use the same year or pick some other important year (Maybe the first year you heard it, or for our example, the year when you played it for your prom date. Don't act like you didn't do it; I know you did, it's just part of growing up in the 90s
). For this year, hold down shift while you press the numbers. So say you picked 1998, it would now be
!((* . Then add this to the end of the string you already have.
NOTE: This is by far the hardest part to remember if you are on a device without a typical keyboard (iPhones, etc.), so be sure to pay attention to the symbols!. Now, our string is "
1997EnimdIsyIfy!((* ".
By using your favorite line of your favorite song, you have a password that is really easy to remember, but doesn't have the typical failures of such passwords since it's not a real word or phrase. It also makes it easy to remember where the captial letters are. By using the dates and shift key, you greatly increase the possible values for each part of the password without greatly increasing the difficulty. You only have to work hard at remembering a short part of the full phrase. If I remember correctly, the total number of possible values is given by
x N, where
x is the total number of characters in the string and
N is the total number of possible values. Since our string is 20 characters long, and since we are using a total of 72 possible values for each slot (26 lowercase + 26 uppercase + 10 numbers + 10 characters), we have a total of 4.72236648×10
93 possible values, which is possibly a few digits bigger than most of our paychecks
. That kind of password is still crackable, but not without some serious NSA-style computing firepower. If you've upset the Feds that much, you're probably SOL anyway, so I can't help you there. But if you just want to make sure that regular script kiddies and h4x0r5 can't steal your valuable info and damage you or your family, this should be pretty much invulnerable* if used correctly.
Hope this helps!
*Only to hacking by password cracking. There's still plenty of other ways to access your data like sniffing your packets while on a wireless connection, spoofing your MAC address and IP, etc., so be sure to have a well-rounded and well-organized cybersecurity plan.
