In the previous post, we have talked about the three requirements which you need to apply in order to end up making powerful passwords.
The importance of creating a solid password lies in giving your account or your personal data a good protection against stealing and hacking attempts. And the importance of making your password memorable lies in saving lots of your time and effort!
What you may want to realize is that it is possible to combine those 2 features for your password! So, if your question at the moment is: How to achieve that?
Then, you are in the right place, because here I am going to give you 4 proven suggestions which can help you build a password that combines the two features:
Strong enough to make criminals feel tired Easy to be remembered by you only
Before we get started, I just want to remind you that when I mention the term “Smart Password“, I indicate a password that is easy to remember by you, and meanwhile, difficult to be guessed by others.
Also, I recommend you Not To Use any of the passwords mentioned in this article, because someone else may steal the virtual passwords and publish them on the dark web that cybercriminals use the stolen passwords as a trying for gaining access to users accounts online, so be careful!
Okay, now, let’s get to the essence of our subject:
How to Create a Smart Password?
Choose Some Information, then Do Some Changes on them
To implement this method (I like to name it the wonder wand), your first step is to join some info together from your choice, and it is better to choose the information that you can easily memorize, for example, your nickname + your postal code + a common word like Zone.
Or rather than combining diverse data randomly, you can choose a sentence like “Science improves human life at every level” or even choosing a phrase that makes no sense or is not in grammatically correct order like “walk sand crystal iron“. Keep in mind that your goal is to initially select a combination of memorable information before jumping into the last step where you have to make your selection unguessable to any person as possible.
Let us suppose that you preferred to pick the following phrase “I like to eat Hummus every Sunday and Monday” as a first step to create your smart password. Now your next step is to turn that phrase into a passphrase—a password that involves multiple words, just combine the words together and it will become as follows IliketoeatHummuseverySundayandMonday.
OK, now that passphrase appears to be a pretty good one! It is excellent in length because it contains 36 characters as well as it is an uncommon phrase, hence, it looks like unpredictable by humans.
But.. it is considered a group of words from a dictionary where new hacking techniques can detect those combined words soon or later, not to mention the importance of adding numbers and special symbols in that phrase!
For those reasons, your last step is to boost your password ability in outsmarting any potential attack by applying all or some of the following modification ideas—I call them tricks:
⚪ Trick#1: The Alternatives
Replace the information that look similar in spelling or in pronunciation or even in meaning!
| Info | Replacing With | Similarity Type |
| 0 | O | spelling |
| for | 4 | pronunciation |
| salary | $ | meaning |
In the passphrase: IliketoeatHummuseverySundayandMonday we find some replaceable info such as the words “to” and “and“, so we are going to replace the word “to” with the number “2” because they are pronounced the same way, and the word “and” with the symbol “&” due to their similarity in the significance or in meaning. Upon implementing that, the passphrase will become Ilike2eatHummuseverySunday&Monday
Remember that the purpose of this trick and the upcoming ones is to make our login credentials easy to write and memorize, meanwhile, making them contain meaningless information so that not everyone is able to predict them.
⚪ Trick#2: The Partial Removing
Shorten any long word you prefer by removing some of its characters, for instance, rather than typing “machine” just type “mach” or type its first digit “m” and so on.
In this password Ilike2eatHummuseverySunday&Monday, we can pick up several long words such as Hummus, Monday, every, and Sunday. Once we determine which long words we like to shorten, we can begin shortening after selecting which characters we aim to remove from each word.
If we decided to use the first letter of every long word there except the word “Hummus”, the password will be Il2eHummuseS&M
⚪ Trick#3: The Opposite Writing Direction
To apply this trick, write the characters of a text or a word in the opposite order. For more clarification, instead of typing the word “Hummus” as it, just type its letters from right to left “summuH”, thereupon, the new form of our password example is going to be Il2esummuHeS&M
⚪ Trick#4: The Guardians
Imagine that you are a rich person or a prince and your password is like the main gate of your own palace, you have a lot of valuable things inside your palace, and you believe that the hardness of the outside door is not enough alone to prevent potential thieves attacks, in that case, what you have to do?
One of the common solutions is to summon guardians there, right?
Treat the guardians of the outside door as the characters which you are going to add for your password. Just remember that you have to put the additional characters in a way that keeps your password memorable to you!
If we want to perform that in the password Il2esummuHeS&M, we can add for example three hyphens – – – at both ends of the password or in the middle or in any other direction we want there, let’s put them between the word “summuH” and the letter “e“, the result would become Il2esummuH—eS&M
Okay, now, the Trick#5 is: The Foreign Password
In this trick, we have…to……oh!…..wow! It looks like our virtual password reached a high-security level and got enough changes!
Very well, have you noticed now the differences between the old form of the password and the new one?
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The old form features → IliketoeatHummuseverySundayandMonday |
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The new form features (after applying the tricks) → Il2esummuH—eS&M |
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Very long (36 characters)
Takes a long time for typing its charactersThis is the wonder wand of our first suggestion in which you can convert any combined data 
or any obvious information into a hard puzzle using some sorts of tricks.
Sure, you are not obliged to use the same strategy by applying all the tricks mentioned above and in that order, it all depends on your own strategies in implementing the changes, but I advise you to apply a minimum of two changers.
Sometimes the trick#2 plus #4 can be enough tools to come up with a smart password. Let’s implement that on a new virtual password:
Mariam 2010 lives in a big house
In a quick way, we will use the Partial Removing (trick#2) by deleting all the characters except the first digits of each word and number, after deletion, the password will be looking as this M2liabh, then, we can directly use the Guardians (trick#4) by adding these symbols /+/ at both ends of the password, and the final result is: /+/M2liabh/+/
Of course, that is not a very complicated password because we performed the actions quickly, however, it is still an acceptable example of smart passwords.
| Notes/ It is better to use this method in generating a few passwords, therefore, using them for registering in certain online services, as this helps you remember them easily. If you have trouble remembering multiple passwords, we propose you generate a unique password, and then utilize it as a master one for the password manager software products you trust, at that phase, we advise you to make it EXTREMELY complicated to unauthorized parties. |
Use the “Tree” Method
In this method, you need to divide your password content into 2 parts, one of them contains fixed characters so that you can use it in every online service, thus, it is the part that you should make it difficult for someone else to guess, at least, make that part of your password long, random, and contains a certain combination of all the character types as possible.
You can use the same ideas and tricks clarified in the first method above in order to make the fixed part complex for others and memorable to you. Or you can memorize any fixed characters by typing them out several times or regularly until they are held in your muscle memory.
Well, let’s suppose this the fixed characters that you had chosen as the first part of your password (We will take the same virtual password that we built in the paragraph of suggestion#1): /+/M2liabh/+/
OK, what about the other part?
The second part of your password and which is considered the easiest part for you to remember-(because it is going to be shown in front of you!), you just need to add information related to the service that you are willing to register in.
To illustrate, if you want to register in YouTube and the fixed part of your password is: /+/M2liabh/+/, you can simply add the name of the website which is YouTube, as this is considered something related to YouTube, in this case, the password would become /+/M2liabh/+/YouTube
Now, you find yourself willing to register in another online service, let’s say you decide to signup on Facebook, the password will be /+/M2liabh/+/Facebook.
And so on. Just make sure that you are free to type the second part of your password anywhere you like, e.x., you can put them in the left side:
YouTube/+/M2liabh/+/
Facebook/+/M2liabh/+/
Also, there are plenty of different ways you can rely on in order to make that part somewhat hard to predicted by others, for instance, using the abbreviation names of the online services (the first letter), then connecting simple info like “hello” with them, take a look for the table below:
| Online Service Name | Password Example |
| YouTube Avira Windows Outlook |
/+/M2liabh/+/Yhello /+/M2liabh/+/Ahello /+/M2liabh/+/Thello /+/M2liabh/+/Whello /+/M2liabh/+/Ohello |
| Note/ It all relies on your choices in adding/ordering the characters for that part. Of course, Do Not use those passwords for your accounts. |
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Alright, it seems you understood the whole picture about the “Tree” method, now, by this method, I think you will never find any difficulty in memorizing your registered passwords even if you are looking for joining 1000 online services, especially if not some of them oblige you to utilize less amount of characters than what you chose for your passwords.
Why I called this method a “Tree”?!
This is for some reasons:
The first part (the fixed characters) represents the tree trunk! It is solid and stable.
And the second part (the related information of service providers) represents the tree leaves, they are too many and each leaf has its own special place.
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Notes/ Maybe the only drawback of relying on the tree method is when you have to change the old fixed part that you used for signing up on several online services in case you decide to use a new fixed characters. |
Use The Keyboards Map Technique
This option can be a suitable alternative for those folks who do not tend to remember each character of their passwords.
Yes, being a password includes characters does not mean they must be memorized!
As proof, the method which I am going to be explaining here differs from the other ones suggested in that it makes you focus mainly on remembering the keyboard buttons that you will press on!
To show you what I indicate to, here is an image clarifies how we have the ability to form a memorable password regardless of what its characters are by using an ordered typing pattern on a keyboard layout:
Based on the steps mentioned in the image, the full password in that pattern is ZXCplij159=086q. Did you notice there how your brain focuses on memorizing the placements of the buttons selected more than the password characters themselves and how the method succeed in facilitating the process of remembering a strong password for us just by using our fingers?
Fortunately, the international keyboards-layouts are likely to look the same and contain more than 100 keys, which means, you have tons of usable options for crafting smart passwords derives from your own typing patterns.
As you saw in the image, the task is not daunting, it is like drawing on a canvas panel!
If you like to craft your login credentials depending on this kind of task, then try it! But do not forget to utilize it in making a Smart Password, which is our article’s objective.
In fact, the usage of the method shall be done appropriately, when you start building your password, using your special typing pattern, please take the following points into consideration:
Firstly, be sure you aim for a password that is too long, has no meaning, and formed by symbols mixed with alphanumeric characters.
Secondly (perhaps, the most important point), beware of making your password content derives fully from sequential keys! To illustrate this particular for you, can you take a look and tell me your opinion about this example of password:
lkjh1qaz2wsx)(*&
At first glance, a lot of people will probably consider it as a crazy login data!
But, …in reality, it is VERY EASY to be broken by experienced hackers!
And the reason is, the sequential keyboard paths:
Despite the fact that the password meets some of the good security requirements such as how its length and randomness level is, a hacker in often times will not encounter with any obstacle for breaking that kind of passwords because it has been created based on a series of keyboard buttons that are next to each other, which is commonly used.
Hence, just apply the instructions explained in those 2 points and you will be able to create a smart password.
| Notes/ In the case of facing difficulties regarding how to remember several different passwords generated from the typing-pattern option, we propose you follow the same idea explained at the end of the paragraph of the suggestion#1. |
Write Down Your Complex Login Credential
This is the simplest method that you may tend to use in order to make your powerful passwords memorable.
Just create truly strong passwords depending on the three strengthening requirements, then write each password you create (along with writing the name of the online service you join) on a sheet of paper or in a notebook no matter if being that writable material is tangible or digital.
By this way, you can remember any password you forget by viewing your notes where you listed all of your registered passwords there.
| Notes/ Even though this method looks very simple, it could be a danger for your account’s security in case you do not use it properly. To give you an idea, you have to hide your notebook from meddlesome people by storing it somewhere that is secret or locked so that you make sure no one can reach your written passwords easily. |
Here we have covered approximately all the necessary details in regard to how to create smart passwords, however, there is a secret suggestion and which you might be willing to discover for creating powerful/memorable login data.
The suggestion is to incorporate the methods suggested all together!
In other words, you take a feature from each method and use them in building a perfect password depending on your own creativity. I personally utilize it in most cases.
At the end, let me thank you for spending your time in reading my article, actually, I would like to know your opinion, did you find the information provided helpful? and which of these suggestions you think suits you?
