How to use Strong and Secure Passwords

One must come up with a strong and secure password. Firstly, you should have a different, fairly long and very strong password for each account. You should not use the same password for all your accounts. Doing so puts every account in jeopardy if one of them gets hacked.

Do not use standard words as your passwords; rather try creating meaningless words from a combination of letters, numbers and symbols. And don't just replace letters in a word with a simple (e.g. "A" with the @ symbol) because that is a very common trick. The password can be strengthened by using a blend of lower and uppercase letters.

The password should be quite complicated. But still, try and use something which you would be able to remember. Come up with something which incorporates various alphanumeric characters. Ideally, it should be a mnemonic sort of thing which you can instantly memorize. But if you see that this is not happening, then spend some time in memorizing that password.

Now remembering more than one password can be a daunting task. This is where a password manager comes into the picture. KeePass is a fairly good, free password-management tool that runs on Windows and Mac OS X. It stores all the passwords in one encrypted database which can be accessed by a single master password.

Then, there is a multi-platform password manager called LastPass which comes with the capability of auto-syncing different computers and browsers, thereby giving you the access to your encrypted database from any device. However, the catch here is that you sacrifice the security of keeping your password list combined to a single drive.

These password managers are great but not 100% safe. The best password is the one you generate yourself, which is highly complicated with a mix of upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers. The trick lies in picking up a short phrase or a long word and get creative with it.