Looking back at some of my posts, I see that I tend to use the phrase “your privacy is an illusion” a lot. One of the reasons why accounts get hacked is because folks have weak passwords and to compound that issue, they use that same weak password on all their sites, including banking sites (sacrilege!). There are several software solutions out there that will generate and manage your passwords as well as several other blog posts that talk about how to generate strong passwords. Think of this as another addition to the already long list of solutions out there.

Follow these steps to generate your own, unique (per site) password:

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is to think of a phrase. For the purposes of an example, I am going to use the phrase “i like to eat out on friday”.
2. Now take the first alphabet of each word and you have the potential password ilteoof
3. Transpose some of the characters to make this stronger (e.g replace i with 1 and o with 0) resulting in 1lte0of
4. Transpose further by changing the alphabet case of the last alphabet resulting in 1lte0oF
5. This will now become the base of your final password for each site
6. On any site that you are registering on, use the site name to add two additional alphabets at the beginning of your base password resulting in a unique password for each site.
   For e.g.
   • if you were registering on amazon.com, you would use ‘am‘ as shorthand for amazon.com and prefix it to your earlier generated base password resulting in am1lte0oF
   • if you were registering on citibank.com, you would use ‘cb‘ as shorthand for citibank.com and prefix it to your earlier generated base password resulting in cb1lteo0F
     

…you get the idea.

The base password may be a pain to type initially but since we punch in our passwords so often during the course of a day, it will become painless very soon. This way you’ll end up generating unique, strong passwords for each site and even (heaven forbid) one of them gets hacked, you are still protected on other sites.