How to Create Unique Passwords (And Remember Them!)

Think quick! How many of the websites you visit share your same passwords?

Many security industry specialists recommend that you should use unique passwords for each of your accounts.

However, with so many accounts that we have in today’s world, it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of all of them.

I’m going to show you a very simple way to create unique passwords and, best of all, remember them when you need to.

The Basic Passphrase Component

Instead of using passwords, we will be using passphrases. phrases that are easy to remember for you but that, due to its length and entropy considerations, are difficult to crack.

What makes a good ==passphrase==? Any phrase that you can remember easily:

• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
• To be or not to be. That is the question.
• Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.
• Today is the best day of your life.
• I’m on a seafood diet. I see food and I eat it.

You name it. Pick or make your favourite phrase!

I will use the first one as our starting point:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Don’t be afraid to play with your keyboard. Start capitalizing and substituting some of the letters for symbols. You may have to remove spaces too, so you will probably end up with something like this:

Th3Qu!ckBr0wnF0xJump5Ov3rTh3L@zyD0g

And that is just for a start! Depending of your needs and preferences, you can make it longer or shorter.

I know! Our first passphrase is somewhat long so, for our purposes, we will shorten it to:

Th3Qu!ckBr0wnF0x

To know more. Interested in some other ways of replacing letters in a word construction context? Good. You can get acquainted with leetspeak for a start.

Let’s move on to the second part of our crafted password!

The Website Name Component

We are going to need the name of the website that is going to use our password.

Let’s say that this password is for the Facebook website.

We do the same kind of letter substitution we did on our basic passphrase, so Facebook becomes:

F@c3b00k

Same goes for other website names such as Twitter (Tw!773r) or Google (G00g13), or any other website name you want.

Bundling it all together

This is the part where the magic happens!

We will join our basic passphrase part with the now modified website name part.

For extra points, you can pick a random symbol to use it as a space, like –, &, %, or any other your heart so desires.

So, for our hypothetical Facebook account, that would be:

Th3Qu!ckBr0wnF0x%F@c3b00k

For Twitter:

Th3Qu!ckBr0wnF0x%Tw1773r

or Google:

Th3Qu!ckBr0wnF0x%G00g13

Of course, you can change the order. You can put the website name part at the beginning…

F@c3b00k%Th3Qu!ckBr0wnF0x

or somewhere in the middle, like right before the last word of your basic passphrase:

Th3Qu!ckBr0wn%F@c3b00k%F0x

The secret is that, whatever your preference, stick to the way you are mixing the basic passphrase part and the modified website name part.

Voilá! Instant, strong, unique passwords for all your website account needs that are also easy to remember for you!