One of the more frustrating exercises in using anything online is keeping your passwords safe. They have to be easy to remember and hard to guess.
Here is a trick I've used for years that seems to work for passwords, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, birthdates and anything that needs to be safe.
Develop a solid base password
This should be a 79-character base that has a combination of upper/lower case letters, numbers, and one or two special characters. For example, the airport code for Phoenix, AZ is PHX' and a date I easily remember is the day JFK was assassinated, 11-22-1963.
So using that as a starting point, I can morph it a little to increase the complexity: PHX becomes PhX, and with 11-22-1963 I can substitute ! for the 1s and the # (shift 3) for the number 3. That results in a base password of PhX!!22!96#Now that you have the base password, develop a schema for any password site name. For exampleGoogle Gmail could become gml or gglgml, making my password for Google Gmail PhX!!2!!96#gml or PhX!!2!!96#gglgml. Easy to remember and difficult to crack.
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