How to choose safe and secure password

Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes
Requirements: An account on NowButtons.com

Password requirement keep going up. Here at NowButtons it's no different. Our password requirements are quite strict At a minimum we require:

  • That it's at least 9 characters long
  • That it contains at least one number
  • That it contains at least one uppercase letter or capital
  • That it contains at least one lower case letter
  • That it contains at least one special character

How you do you come up with a password that you can remember and that meets all these requirements?

Step 1

First rule for any password, never use a single or a combination of words! No matter how long it is, those are easy to hack. Consider this comment from a hacker back in 2012:

"We regularly crack pass phrases that are 15 to even 100 chars long because they are too simple."

This doesn't mean it's bad to use words or phrases, but that's only your starting point. That can be the basis which can help you remember your password. Once you have your words or phrase, you should become creative!

Step 2

Replace letters with other letters that sound phonetically similar. Example are 'f' and 'ph', 'x' and 'ks', etc.

Step 3

Remember the horrible trend back in the early 2000s of using numbers that sounds phonetically simiar to certain words? Use that too: 4 = 'for', 2 = 'too', etc.

Swap out letters that looks somewhat similar to numbers. For example the number 1 could replace the letter 'L' or the letter 'I'. the 3 could replace the letter 'E', the 0 could replace the letter 'O', etc.

Step 4

Now let's move to the special characters. You could probably swap out some letters with special characters. For example the 'A' can be replanced with the @, the word 'and' can be replaced with the ampersand '&', the ! could replace the letter 'i', $ could replace the letter 'S', etc.