The issue of password security is one that never goes out of style, and is that despite everything that is constantly spoken on the Internet about the importance of using secure and complex passwords , every year appear in the list of the most Used the same infamous things as “ 123456 ” or the word “password”.

Why is that still happening? the answer is not difficult to decipher. People use weak passwords because they are easy to remember. It’s that simple. The main reason we forget a password is because we have nothing to relate to it, if we do not bother to associate it with something, we’ll probably forget it in less than a day. Here’s the goal of this article: help you improve your passwords and remember them using mnemonic rules.

Everyone seems to care more that we forget the password and stay out of our own accounts, to make it so easy to guess that a third party steals it. The solution to this is not to choose the first thing that comes to mind , or to use passwords that we can associate with something easily, such as our birthday or the name of our pet. After all, anyone can know our birthday or find out the name of our pet in 20 seconds just looking at our Instagram account.

Learn to create good passwords

The solution is to create our own rules for forming passwords . Using mnemonic tricks, that probably once you applied at school to memorize everything you remember asking teachers instead of understanding, you can make passwords extremely complex and easy to remember.

When we use the nemotechnology to remember things, what we do is to associate the information with other data that are already part of our memory . So we can create an extremely long password and at no time will we have to remember it whole, simply associating its parts with something else we can decrypt it again when we touch it.

If you are a person who prefers to use a password manager and prefers to use their own brain to manage them, it is time for you to learn some tricks you can use. These are usually the ones that I apply personally, but starting from the central idea, the limit is only your imagination and what seems easier to remember.

Before teaching the tricks we have to consider what are the most important aspects of a secure password :

• Length: the longer the better, it takes a second to guess a simple eight character password. If you double the amount and increase the complexity it takes millions of years.
• Complexity: The password must have not only letters, but numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters and special characters.
• Difficult to guess: do not use words or numbers that can be directly associated with you simply by viewing your Facebook profile.
• Unique: no password is infallible and can leak into a data leak. Never use the same password on two sites.

Now learn how to create a password that meets all those requirements and that we can remember easily … many times.

Important dates with a spin

This is one of the easiest ways to add numbers and symbols to your password and remember them with ease. For example, let’s say your birthday is October 12, 1981. Using only “121081” as a password would be incredibly easy to remember, but abysmally stupid . But do not discard the idea, you just have to improve it.

Take an important date for yourself that you always remember and instead of using it in the simplest way, add complexity . For example, enclose it in parentheses or brackets and then separate it with scripts: it (12-10-1985) o [12-Octubre-85]‘s a million times better than 121085.

Refuse bad passwords, but in sentences

“123456” is the worst password in history and yet today we will not ask you to stop using it. Again, you just have to improve it by adding complexity. Using phrases instead of keywords is always ideal when creating a password. How can we use that infamous number in a secure password ?, in something like this "12345EsUnPasswordMalo!".

That password is long, has letters, numbers, symbols (more if we leave the quotes), uppercase and lowercase letters and is easy to remember like most of Earth’s bad jokes.

Patterns like the keyboard

Another extremely insecure and widely used password is “qwerty”. Why? Because it is a pattern in the keyboard of your computer easy to follow and to remember. Again, we do not have to rule out the use of these techniques that fail despite their good intentions.

Instead of the PC keyboard we can use the mobile keyboard to convert our passphrase into numbers . If each number corresponds to several letters, you can get something like “MiPasswordEs7277967”. If you type “password” with the keypad of the mobile, it corresponds to the numbers 7277967. So funny.

Use a distinctive item for each account

Another good idea is to use the numeric keypad of the mobile to get the numbers that represent the name of each service we use and thus differentiate passwords. Instead of numbers we can use something special with which to associate each account. 

Create your own password formula

All of the above are simple examples that can give you an idea of how to create your own formula. One of my favorites is to use the first letter of the chorus of a song that I like very much , to that I add a number that I always remember and that is constant in all passwords, and of course something that identifies each account individually for Not repeat passwords.

I use songs, you can use inspirational phrases, passages from a book, the name of a TV series, the slogan of a brand or movie, the name of a disc, etc.

Remember that the important thing is the formula, not what you write with it, if you have a defined pattern and always use the same process every time you register in a new place, you can always decrypt your own password .

Never share your formula with anyone else , there is always the possibility that if you can decipher it, someone else could identify the pattern. And remember, if a service you use is compromised, always change your password. When you have a list, you can prove how safe it is on this site and know how much it would take to crack it.