One question that gives people and absolute headache is when I say their password needs resetting, to think of a new password and one they haven’t used before. Common response is ‘I can’t remember all these different passwords’ and very often they’re written down on paper or they use the same password for absolutely everything which is a recipe for disaster.

Confused Geeky Woman

SO WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE?
For the websites I access for both business and personal, I have 162 different passwords to date; yes I know that seems a bit ridiculous, but I don’t have anything written down and as I said all my passwords are different.

I’ll share with you the method I’ve used for years now which is far safer than writing them down or using the same password for all your online accounts.

So as an example we’ll use the word ‘pcresqit’, but as the standard requirement today is a minimum of 8 characters, a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, one number and in some cases a symbol such as *, & or !, so to cover all of these requirements, let’s change this word to ‘pcR3sq!t’.

Now this would work for all websites but as I mentioned earlier, we don’t want to be using this for all our accounts and making it too easy for other people to guess.

Now let’s imagine you’re a Sky customer and you need to setup a password for your online account. What you can do here is take the first 2 characters of Sky and incorporate that into your word. So in this instance, the password would be ‘spcR3sq!tk’ or it could be ‘skpcR3sq!t’ or if you take the first and last characters it could be ‘spcR3sq!ty’ or ‘sypcR3sq!t’.

Everybody’s brain works differently, so change the system to whichever way works best for you, but the main thing is not to forget your word and your system and you’ll never need to write anything down and all your passwords will be different.Don’t use an obvious word; think of something fairly obscure.

You could go one step further and have one word for your business accounts and another for your personal accounts and then use the same system for both. Hope that helps.