Simple tricks to have a secure password and remember it

After the hacking of some HBO social network accounts and after the theft of chapters and content from its most important series, Game of Thrones, we ask ourselves, are your passwords safe? This is the eternal debate, that of passwords, and the most used last year, from more to less within the top 10, were: 123456, 123456789, qwerty, 12345678, 111111, 1234567890, 1234567, password, 123123 and 987654321. But how can we develop or have a strong password in a simple way and remember after this? 

How to have a secure password?

The more characters a password has, the more complicated it is for someone else to get hold of it. The number of characters is what makes a password more or less quickly discovered. What is usually recommended is a strong password of at least twelve characters, a fairly high and safe level. Something unsafe is using names of cities or pets. There are patterns or passwords that, although very long, are absurd, because the software used to extract passwords removes them immediately, because these tools are programmed to detect patterns, such as '1234567890987654321'. Many numbers, but the level of security is very poor because it has a basic logic behind it.

The best option to have a good password is to mix letters, numbers, uppercase, lowercase and symbols. Added to the twelve characters we will have a very secure password. These three factors discussed are the basis for having a password. We review them: twelve characters minimum, use names of cities, pets or consecutive numbers and mix numbers, uppercase, lowercase and symbols.

Use a phrase as a password

We have as a great option, the use a phrase or set phrase as a strong password. Bruce Schneider, a security expert recommended this relatively simple method, such as creating a password based on a certain phrase. This allows us to take a famous event that happened on a certain day or important, such as the place and date of our wedding or the birth of a child.

Example: 'AMD launched the AMD RX Vega 64 on August 14, 2018'. The pattern that we would develop, for example, is: 'AMDlalasAMDVe64elpa14deagde2018'. As we can see, we cut some words, taking the first two letters from many and we are left with a highly secure password that will surely take a long time to decipher.

You can use the combination that you like the most and on the topic that interests you the most. Ideally this should be a private and personal event to prevent you from being able to guess using a public event.

Meaningless phrases

If you are looking for something different, you can choose use words that have no connection between them or phrases that do not make sense, but be funny and that we can remember. An example would be 'RajoyGanoNobelAstrofisica'. It's a funny, meaningless, and very surreal phrase that we can easily remember and is a strong candidate for a strong password. It has the downside, this method, the fact that we can forget it if we do not have a good memory or that it can be guessed using dictionaries.

There is the PAO method, which is much better and was developed by engineers at Cernegie Mallon University. It refers to 'person, action and object', which makes it a fairly simple mnemonic and one of the best we can use. '¿¿AssaultorminawithaCorsairenmouseBelchite?' The truth is that it makes little sense, but it is quite funny. They can be concepts that are not very related to each other or that do not make much sense. There are many options and everything is a matter of imagination and what you remember.

Advanced method to have a strong password for people with good memory 

The good thing about these methods to have a secure password is that they are relatively simple and we can remember with some ease. But it's not worth just one. We must have several, ideally one for each site or for several, but no more than five. This is because the same thing can happen as in Pordede, the content download website, which was hacked and the passwords of the users were stolen and sold on the network, therefore, our security would be useless if they all have the same password.

A good option is to have a group of passwords, similar or with the same base, but with different names or moments and make small variations. We can choose animals, cities or foods that we like as a base and combine them to create secure passwords. It is also recommended, from time to time, to change them, being able to rotate the passwords between the different pages, something that increases the security of the websites we use.

Does using a password manager help?

You can use a password manager if you are always on the same PC. Firefox and Chrome currently use native password managers, and you can sign in to keep your passwords across devices. They generate highly secure random and meaningless passwords for you, but you don't remember them.