How do I create good passwords?

A strong password isn’t necessarily a good password. More important than its strength is its uniqueness. This means that a good password must be different than any other password you use and ideally different than what anyone else uses.

The best password is a random password. And the best way to create those is by using a dedicated password manager app. These apps can create random passwords up to 64 characters long. The app remembers your passwords and fills out automatically. And because they are designed with security in mind, you can feel pretty confident your passwords are safe.

If you decide against using a password manager (not recommended) or trying to think of a good master password for it, here are some tips for human-created passwords:

1. Don’t use any information that is available to anyone, like birthdays, names or things like that.
2. The best passwords, being both easy to remember and hard to crack, are random words. This may sound counterintuitive but it’s true; even four, randomly selected words are stronger than the passwords we usually create. However, randomness is the key factor here, which is why we bolded it three times.
3. If you have to (or want to) use symbols and mixed capitalization avoid using the expected ones:
   1. Don’t capitalize the first letter, capitalize a random one.
   2. Don’t append a number at the end, add one within.
   3. Don’t use the usual letter symbol substitutions, like a = @ and s = $
4. Make it long—at least 16 characters long.
5. Use a non-Latin alphabet and non-English words if you can.

But remember: Creating a great password and then using variations of it on different sites undoes the whole effort!