You don’t need have an elephant’s memory to remember passwords – a few simple tips and tricks should do the job!
Though it is easier to just use something like a child’s name, pet name or your birthday as your password – don’t! Those are the easiest for someone else, even a stranger, to guess.
There are tricks to help you create and remember passwords. You can associate a specific sentence with a website, and then create a mnemonic for that sentence. You could say for instance, “I want those Bluetooth speakers” as the sentence for an electronics store, and your password might be “IwtBTs234”. Or you can use an entire short sentence with some numbers and special characters as a password. The longer the password, the more difficult it is to crack.
There are several password manager apps available as well in the market, and individuals can use these secure apps to store and retrieve passwords. Some examples of password manager apps at LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane. Some password managers also generate passwords for you. Most of these have versions that work across different operating systems and devices, including mobile apps. Having a strong password is important. Why? Because hackers are constantly at work day and night to crack passwords and get into accounts for multiple reasons - identity spoofing, stealing valuable information, etc. Once your identity is stolen, it is very difficult and time-consuming to set things right again.
Get into the discipline of following proper cyber hygiene and follow the rules of having strong passwords and not repeating them across accounts. Once you establish a process of setting strong passwords and finding ways that work for you to remember them, you will find that it’s not that difficult to remember passwords after all.
View our brief video on setting strong passwords by clicking here.
By Sanjay Deo.