How to Make a Strong Password & Things to Avoid

Every day, hackers and scammers find new ways to steal passwords and other important personal information. That’s why it’s important to come up with strong passwords for every critical account. But what are good passwords to use? In this article, we’ll show you how to create a strong password.

Creating a Strong Password Using a Password Manager

The first thing to know about creating a strong password is that you should be using a password manager on your iPhone. Password managers are great tools that will remember all of your passwords for you so that you don’t have to. On top of that, your password manager is able to instantly generate passwords that are more than likely stronger than any password you might make up on your own.

You might be thinking that a password manager is more dangerous because if all your passwords are in one place, doesn’t that just mean it’s easier for hackers and thieves to steal all of your passwords at once? That would be the case, but innovations in cybersecurity make having a password manager way safer than trying to remember all of your passwords on your own or writing them down in a notebook. As long as you equip your password manager with a strong password and use multi-factor authentication, breaching a password manager is very difficult. For more helpful security tips, be sure to sign up for our free Tip of the Day newsletter. Now, let’s go over how to create strong passwords.

How to Create a Strong Password

So now you know that using a password manager means you can easily create strong passwords for every account without having to remember them all. But you still need to make sure your password manager itself is protected. So, how do you make a good password for your password manager? If you use the Apple Passwords app, you don’t need to create a master password, since you can just use Face ID on your iPhone.

If you are using a third-party password manager, such as Bitwarden, you will need to make up a master password that is difficult to guess and easy to remember. Now, you might think this means using a password like “G0Hawks!79.” After all, a password like that has upper and lowercase letters, a symbol, and numbers. Not to mention it’s a sports team, and maybe you’re using your birth year for the numbers, so that makes it easy to remember. However, this type of password is easy for a computer to guess. A hacker could simply tell a computer, “This person is a Hawks fan and was born in 1979,” and the computer would figure out this password in seconds.

So, what is an example of a strong password? When creating the master password for your password manager, the best thing to do is to use a random word generator to pick out three or four random words that are connected by symbols. So you want to end up with a password that looks like this: pueblo-bonanza-flier-riot. This is a difficult password for a computer to guess since it is completely random. It looks difficult to remember at first, but the more times you read your password, the easier it’ll become to memorize.

We recommend writing down this password and keeping it somewhere secure, like a family safe, in case you forget it. You can also write it on a scrap of paper and keep it on you, like in a wallet or purse, until you have it memorized. Once you have it memorized, destroy that scrap of paper.

Once you have your password manager secured, rely on it to generate strong passwords and save your account information for you.

Top image credit: guteksk7 / Shutterstock.com