How to Make a Password - Creating Sophisticated Passwords that are Easy to Remember

If you do any shopping, bill paying, banking, or communicating online, it is safe to assume that you have created at least five to ten passwords. If not, you may have created one password that you are using for more than one account. Whether you have one or many, we can all agree on one thing. When we make a password, we want it to be easy for us to remember and hard for someone else to figure out.

Using one password for many accounts can be risky for obvious reasons. It may be an easy way to manage your accounts but If someone finds or figures out your one password, all of your accounts are at risk.

Managing multiple passwords for many accounts can be challenging also. When you have more than one password, you need to keep them written down and stored away in a safe place. If someone finds your hiding place, they will have access to all of your passwords.  They can also be misplaced, lost or destroyed in an unfortunate situation like a fire or storm.

There is an easy way to solve this problem. It is not full proof but it will help. This technique was introduced by a contributing author for a local Atlanta newspaper. It is a clever way to make a password that is strong and pretty easy to memorize.

The writer suggested that you think of your favorite song. (Its best to think of something that is not so popular.) Then, you take the first letter from your favorite line in the song and you use it as your password. For this example, we will use the popular children’s song Hush Little Baby.

If we take the first line that states…

“Hush little baby don’t say a word, Mama‘s gonna buy you a mockingbird”

….we can turn it into the following password

HLBDSAWMGBYAM

When you look at this, you have no idea that it is the first letters of a popular song. It just looks like a bunch of letters put together. The only person that would know the secret behind this password would be you. That what makes this technique so clever.

You can also make this password a bit stronger by reversing the order. Putting the last word first creates a totally different password from the same song. If we do this, the above password would become the following:

MAYBGMWASDBLH

Once again, something extremely popular and easy to remember turned into something that looks random and complicated. We can make this password even stronger by replacing the double letters with their numeric positions in the alphabet. In the above example, the double letters are M, A, and B. A is the 1st letter in the alphabet, B is the 2nd letter and M is the 13th letter. By doing this, we can turn the above password into the following:

13AYBGMW1SD2LH

To the average person, this would look like a password that was generated by a software program. The last thing that would cross a persons mind would be the lyrics to Hush Little Baby. Now imagine if you used a song that was semi popular or not popular at all.

Using this technique is a whole lot safer than using your date of birth, favorite color or something similar.  You can make a password from any of your favorite lyrics and it will be just as strong as the one shown above. And if you are not a music lover, it doesn’t matter. You can take your favorite phrase or a poem and it will work just as well.