This happens many a times — you have to create or change your password but you want it to be memorable yet not an easy one for security reasons. Having a dictinoary word as a password means crackers only have to run your login through a dictionary attack and there will be good chances that they will get lucky. At other times you may choose the one that’s just too secure and complex to remenber. Well here are a few tips to generate a smart, secure but memorable password.

1. Pick two dictionary words and join them with special characters. Eg. take the words ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ and you can join them like so to get a memorable password: cat!dog. That’s just for an example and you may want to include multiple special characters or numbers to enhance it’s security.
2. Pick up a memorable non-English word and type it in English. Eg: ‘namaskar’ stands for greeting in Sanskrit language.
3. Use a combination of two or more proper nouns concatenated with special characters. Proper nouns aren’t dictionary words, thus they have better chances against creacking using a dictionary attack.
4. Use the date: Dates strengthen the password by including numbers in the password. Thus a cracker will have to include numbers in addition to the English alphabets.
5. Reverse the letters: Simple but more effective than just using a dictionary word — for a password like cat!dog, turning it into tac!god adds another level of security.
6. Utilize the similarity in characters to transform your password to something more cryptic. Eg. a password like ‘Iaminlove’ can be changed to ‘1m1nl0ve‘.

You can get creative but the point is to have a password that is secure while memorable. That helps you remember it and makes it difficult for the crackers to guess. We must also mention that using a strong password by no means guarantees security against hackers and crackers but is moreso a step to be smart and make things difficult for the bad guys. For higher security change your passwords regularly, try to memorise them instead of storing them in a written form anywhere and be watchful.

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