This is a great tip from LifeHacker.com about a simple way to create hundreds of different but memorable passwords.
It should go without saying you should never use the same login and password details for every account. At the very, very least you should have separate and very secure passwords to use on your most sensitive accounts, such as your bank account, PayPal and your domain register.
Ideally you should have different passwords for every account. Here is a simple way of doing that.
STEP 1 – Choose a Base Password
Decide on a base password. This can be anything, but try two letters and two numbers. Here are a few examples:
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The first two letters of your birth month and the last two numbers of your birth year, so June 1969 would be JU69
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A key sequence that is easy to type, e.g., 12QW
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Your house number and first two letters of your road name, e.g., 14 Asbury Road would be 14AS
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You get the idea
STEP 2 – Create a Rule for Domain Name Characters
Next create a rule for choosing letters from the website’s domain name, for example:
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The first four letters in reverse order, so eBay would be YABE and Amazon would be ZAMA
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The last four letters of the domain in reverse order, so Amazon would be NOZA
For the few domain names that consist of only three letters, simply have a default number you always add onto the end, e.g. 9, in which case the password for IBM would be MBI9.
STEP 3 – Combine Base Passwords with Domain Name Characters
Once you have your base password and your rule for the domain name characters, simply combine the two; so using the first example in STEPS 1 and 2, the password for Amazon would be JU69ZAMA and for eBay, JU69YABE. Pretty secure?
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So that you can use the same rule for remembering all your Internet passwords, you should ensure that every password combination is at least eight characters long and has a combination of letters and numbers.
Simple!
You now have a way of creating an unlimited number of unique yet memorable passwords.
END.