One Master Password to Secure Them All
If you’re using a banking website or paying your credit card bills online, you should not try to think up secure passwords. Let a password manager like LastPass or Dashlane take care of that for you. After you’ve installed one of those programs you will need one really good password to secure your LastPass or Dashlane password vault.
Here are some tips that will help you to both create and remember a secure password:
- Think of a favorite line from a movie, lyrics of song, something your grandma used to say, a Bible verse or other quotation.
- Write down the line of text or song lyrics. Good grammar and punctuation helps, you’ll find out why in a moment.
- Take the first letter of each word or line and write it down.
- Replace some of the words with numbers or symbols, if possible. Example: Change “too” to 2, or “and” to &.
- You should now have a password that is much safer than
Password@123orGoCats! - Add a number at the end if it’s less than 8-10 characters long.
Examples:
A nugget of wisdom from your grandma
“If you ain’t poopin', get off the pot!” => Iuap,g0tp!
Song lyrics that make you shed a tear
Oh, the sun shines bright
On my old Kentucky home
'Tis summer,
The old folks are gay
Well, the corn top's ripe
And the meadow's in the bloom
While the birds make music
All the day
-
Stephen
Foster
=> O0'Tw&WA-sf
(We added a - on a line by itself and split the author’s name over two lines. A little complexity helps!)
A Reference to a Bible Verse
Surprise—popular Bible verses are also popular passwords. It should not come as a shock when we suggest that you do not use John3:16 or phil4:13. Instead, choose a selection of verses from the same chapter, for example, Psalm91:1-2,9-10. Doing so satisfies the complexity requirements for most passwords by having capital and lowercase letters, a number, a special character, and is longer than 10 characters.
Finally …
Do not use your master password anywhere else. It should only be used to protect your password vault.