

And considering that many password managers offer free versions, there’s really no excuse not to have one. According to the security experts we consulted, it’s the best option for protecting everything from financial data to drugstore loyalty accounts. The manager safely stores all of your other passwords for you, often allowing you to access your passwords from any computer, tablet, or phone. With a password manager, however, you only need to remember one master password. This made for a tough password to crack, with one downside: It was an equally tough password to remember.

Eventually, the instructions were to come up with seemingly random strings of characters, numbers, and symbols. Instead, we were told to use assortments of words and numbers - until that wasn’t hard enough, either. That’s just too easy to crack, security experts say. Using our example, imagine a flight to the moon with a tiger as its captain: "Over the speaker, the tiger notified us that the runway on the moon is full of craters.The days of using your first child’s name and birth date for all your passwords are long gone. Try inventing a story to remember your random word combination. Of course, it's important not to forget your new passphrase. Remember your passphrase with a mnemonic device If you want help creating a passphrase, you can use an online tool like ⇱ to create one automatically. Of course, you can also add numbers or special characters to make it even combination of length and random word choice makes even basic passphrases more secure-and more difficult to crack than standard-length passwords. The first few lines of your favorite story or a chorus will likely be easy to crack.Īrbitrary word combinations are much better, such as: The same rule applies to passphrases just having a long passphrase won't offer much protection against hackers. Strong passwords contain random character combinations that are difficult for cybercriminals to guess.
