We have spent many hours helping clients manage their data and helped with systems to make their lives easier. We then insist they have really good passwords and the cry comes back “how am I supposed to remember that“.
In our business we manage thousands of passwords both for our self and for our clients’ web sites and systems. We don’t try to remember these or even write them down, instead we use a password safe (Lastpass, SecureSafe etc.) which is secured by a master password.
But, and the big but is how do a set my super safe master password? The best master password is a long password. It doesn’t have to be complex. So a simple way to do this is to think of something like your walk to school when you were a child. For me there were a number of memorable elements to my walk. First there was the red letter box where I would often drop in post on the way, then I would cross the road to avoid the big wolfhound. As I got to the high street I would look in for my grandfather who worked at the butchers. Using this, I have selected the following to make up my master password. Post, Cross, Hound, Butcher. That is 21 characters and so my new master password would be postcrossHounDbutcher . To test this out, I go went to https://password.kaspersky.com/ (don’t use your real password here) and this tells me that my password will be hacked in 691 Centuries. Not bad!
Proton has a super password generator here https://proton.me/pass/password-generator
