Over the past two days, hackers have posted the stolen login information and passwords for thousands of email accounts at GMail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. While Gmail has taken steps to remedy the problem, there are some things that you should do immediately to protect your accounts:

- Check your email account for suspicious activity
- Reset your password NOW
- Don’t use the same password for every login you use.

I’m not going to lecture on why it’s a bad idea to use your first pet’s name as your password. I’m just going to show you one way to choose a secure one that isn’t easily cracked.

If you have other methods, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

What Not to Use

I know it’s more convenient to use an easily-rememberable word as your password, but it’s not a good idea to use a dictionary word because they are easily crackable. Use a password of at least 12 characters, with upper and lower case and numbers. Don’t use your birthday, your social security number, the word “password,” a string of numbers in sequence (like 1234) or in reverse (like 9876), or your name anywhere in the password.

Start by Choosing a Word of 7 or 8 Letters, plus a Date

An example: Let’s say you want to use the word “seahawk” because that was the name of your first yacht and you can remember it. Let’s also say that your mother-in-law’s birthday is June 24. Turn the birthday into 624 and scatter those numbers into the word. Here I’ve used them to separate the two words “sea” and “hawk,” because it will be a little easier to remember.

6sea2hawk4

Mix it Up a Little

Now throw in some capital letters in the third places of the two words (not the first places, because that’s expected and so is more easily crackable):

6seA2haWk4

Change the lowercase e to a 3 because it looks like a backwards E and it keeps “sea” from being a dictionary word:

6s3A2haWk4

Add Characters to Make a Total of 12 or 14

Hm. We only have 10 characters, so add two more letters at the end — maybe your mother’s initials:

6s3AhaWk4JM

There you go. Strong password based on a word and a date that you can remember.

Use Different Trailing Letters for Different Websites

Since it’s never a good idea to use the same password for everything, you could use this same password string with different last two characters for all your sites:

6s3AhaWk4YH forYahoo

6s3AhaWk4GM for GMail

and so forth.

Make it tougher for the bad guys to guess your passwords!

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