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One of the most important thing you must do to make your online activities safer is to create secure passwords. While it’s critical that your password is complex enough to avoid people guessing it, we also have to keep in mind that we also need to remember all of them in order for them to remain useful. Add to that, a dozen of email, online banking or website accounts that you have, and you have yourself a whole lot to remember. While some may be thinking of jotting them down somewhere or even using only a single password for all accounts, this is extremely risky and not recommended in any circumstances at all!

So, how do you create highly unguessable (by human or machine) passwords which are also easy to remember? Well, here is a list of steps that I have compiled that can guide to do just that:

Step 1 - Create a base password

The first step is to create a base password. This should be something that you can remember. Avoid using sequences like “abcdef”, repetitions like “gggg”, names like “harry” or “jane” and dictionary words. It has to be something really random that doesn’t have any obvious meaning at all.
Here’s how to create one. Choose a song title or phrase you like, that has at least 5 words in it. Also, choose one that has numbers in it. For example, “Kill 2 Birds With 1 Stone”. Combine the first letter of every word to create an acronym. So you have “K2BW1S”, which won’t make any sense to anyone trying to read it.

Step 2 - Add complexity to the base

There are few things you can do to add complexity. First, find out which service or account you will be using the password for. Let’s say you are using it for a Yahoo account. Select the first and the last letters from the word “Yahoo”. Next, put the first letter at the front of your base and the last letter at the back of your base. Using our base in Step 1, adding “Y” to the front and “O” to the back of “K2BW1S” will create “YK2BW1SO”.

Step 3 - Add in special characthers

An easy way to add in special characters is to replace an “S” with “$”, “A” with “@” or N with “&”. Just replacing one of these would be good enough. For example, replacing “S” with “$” in our modified base will create “YK2BW1$O”.

Step 4 - Mix uppercase or lowercase

The simplest way to do this is to make all letters lowercase, and setting only one letter in uppercase. Let’s put the first letter in uppercase, and the rest in lowercase for our example. So, we will have “Yk2bw1$o” as our password.

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So there you have it, in just 4 simple steps. I wouldn’t recommend you using the password “Yk2bw1$o” that is created above, as it has already been published online. Also, don’t use this system as it is. Instead, try using this system as guide to create your own personal system.

The trick here is to memorize the system to create a password, not the password itself. Experiment with different variations, like using longer base password words, and creating your own set of rules to add complexity. Also, test your password’s strength with Microsoft’s own password checker which can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx.

Always remember that a password is a very personal thing. It shouldn’t be known even to the closest people to you.

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