5 secrets to create and keep track of secure passwords.
I just got an email notifying me that my password will expire in 7 days! Time to reinvent the wheel and come up with another super secure pass code? Why torture yourself with password trauma? Here are my 5 easy tips to a better password!
Instead of banging your head on your table or coming up with a complicated password that will be hard for you to remember, I decided to outline how I like to generate my passwords. Disclaimer: Please don’t use the example passwords for your logins. They aren’t secure! Please do use my tricks to help you generate even better ones!
Tip 1: Turn your password into a sentence. Use at least one proper noun within the sentence to make it a little complicated and end with punctuation. Take the first letters of each word and punctuation for your password. Here’s an example:
My sentence: It is time to make a new password for my Healthcurity email account!
My password: IittmanpfmHea!
Pretty secure!
Tip 2: As a rule of thumb you want to make sure that your password is at least 10 characters long. The addition of a special character helps make it secure. I’d recommend always including some form of punctuation. You can even create two short sentences if you want to make the sentence a little more complex:
My sentence: Is it time to change my Healthcurity email password? Yes it is!
My password: IittcmHep?Yii!
Again, pretty secure.
Tip 3: Sometimes a password requires you to use both numbers and letters. In those situations, I like to incorporate the number into the sentence instead of tacking on at the end or the beginning- which can be hard for me to remember. I never like to use birthdates or other numbers of any significance in my passwords because they are likely some of the first things someone will try when trying to hack into your account:
My sentence: It is the 17th of the month and I need to change my Dynamic Edge email password!
My password: Iit17otmaIntcmDEep!
Not too shabby!
Tip 4: One more concern that I’m sure you face (I certainly do!) is the fact that you need to create a new password for your business accounts on a regular basis. For example, here at Dynamic Edge we require our team to create a new email password once a month. If you are in the same situation, one trick is to incorporate the month into your password sentence. This will allow you to replace the month with the current one each time you need to create a new password. Here’s an example for October:
My sentence: Is it time to change my Healthcurity password? Yes it is October!
My password: IittcmHp?YuuO!
Then when you need to change it for November, simply change the password to:
My sentence: Is it time to change my Healthcurity password? Yes it is November!
My password: IittcmHp?YuuN!
The best part of altering a password in this manner is the fact that you’ll be able to use the same password year to year if you choose. Typically IT standard operating procedure requires that a password be unique for 3 consecutive months. This means that your October password could always be the same if you want.
Tip 5: If you need to make your password longer, I like to incorporate one word in my password. I write out the password the way I’ve described above, underlining the first letter of every word, but also include an entire word as part of the password. For example:
My sentence: Is it time to change my Healthcurity password? Yes it is October!
My password: IittchangemHp?YiiO!
I hope these tricks make your life dealing with passwords a little easier. If you feel overwhelmed dealing with too many passwords, check out my post on password management. We want to make sure that your data is safe, but also that you can easily access what you need. Please let me know if you have any questions about securing your passwords!
If you’re concerned about your users and whether or not they are changing or using secure passwords, or even if their information is getting onto the Dark Web, consider asking us for a ransomware vulnerability assessment.
