Privacy Prompt 2: Change One High Risk Account to a Strong, Unique Password

Last week you learned about high-risk accounts and created a list of them. This week's task is to change your password on one of them to a strong, unique password (here's everything you ever needed to know about passwords). You can change more than one of course, but let's start small. The first one is the most challenging because it's not just about changing the password. You also should come up with a way to generate a strong, unique password that you'll be able to remember.

That's the challenge, isn't it?  One way to do it is to install a password manager and have it generate the password. There are pros and cons to this technique which we'll discuss in a future prompt.  This week I'm going to teach you a method for developing strong, unique, and memorable passwords.

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The Strong and Memorable Password Formula:

Step 1: Think of a memorable phrase and take its acronym
“Can’t Buy Me Love” = cbml
Step 2: Add a special character (because most websites require one)
cbml?
Step 3: Look at the name of the website and drop the last character (or the first, whichever you want – some websites won’t let you use the full website name in your password)
cbml?amazo
Step 4: Capitalize one of the letters, according to a formula you know (like second letter of the website)
cbml?aMazo
Step 5: Add on a number of some length (the three digits of your phone number after the area code? Your parents’ zip code?)
cbml?aMazo25609
And you’re done! Believe it or not, this is a very easy password to remember. The first few times you use it you’ll run through the steps, but quickly it will become second nature to type it. And each password will be unique to a website:
cbml?fAceboo25609
cbml?gOogl25609

This is a password that is unguessable, not in any hash dictionary, long, and unique.

You can now go through all your high-risk accounts and change the passwords, or you can just do one, and next week when you get the next Privacy Prompt, do the next one.  Eventually you'll have gotten through them all.