How do you choose a secure password that is easy to remember? Every member account on a website also needs a password. It often has to meet various criteria, such as containing uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters, and having a certain minimum length. Unfortunately, it is not easy to remember such passwords permanently. That is why people often use the same password on several websites, written down on a note stuck to the screen.
That is not a good idea, of course! If the password is read by an unauthorised third party, they can use it to log in to several websites at once.
Ideally, a good password is therefore also unique to each website.
One way to come up with a secure, unique password that is easy to remember is to use a scheme as a kind of mnemonic. A password chosen using a scheme is much easier to remember, because you can build a secure password from building blocks that are easy for you to remember. For this you can use, for example, a passage from a well-known book or part of a song lyric:
Ein bisschen Frieden, ein bisschen Träumen
und dass die Menschen nicht so oft weinen ...
(from: "Ein bißchen Frieden" by Nicole)
Now, from this sentence, you take for example the first letter of every second word plus all the punctuation marks:
Ein bisschen Frieden , ein bisschen Träumen und dass die Menschen nicht so oft weinen ...
b,eTdMsw
Simpler, but somewhat less secure, is using the first letter of every word (e.g. EbF,ebTuddMnsow).
This scheme alone is already hard for an outsider to guess. You should perhaps also avoid using your absolute favourite song. However, the password is still a bit too short, contains only uppercase and lowercase letters, and is not yet unique to that one website.
A number and a special character would still be desirable. A good way to add them is to work in an important personal date. This date should not be your birthday, an anniversary or the like, though. Using just the year is perfectly sufficient — the only important thing is that you can remember the scheme by which the numbers are inserted. Here, too, you can use the song lyric as a mnemonic. In this example, the year of German reunification is used as the number: 1990. It fits the lyric wonderfully and can be inserted at the appropriate place. To make it less obvious that it is a year, we reverse the digits:
b0991,eTdMsw
(the year is used instead of "Frieden")
The length and complexity of the password are now actually sufficient. To make the password unique, you can, for example, include the website's domain. In the example scheme, the first two and the last two letters of the domain ("swindi") are built into the password:
swb0991,eTdMswdi
Once you have memorised the scheme, you can use it to create more passwords, e.g. for Facebook:
Fab0991,eTdMswok
It is also advisable to use different schemes for different areas. For example, you can distinguish between the following areas:
Websites in similar areas often handle password security in similar ways. It is relatively easy to find a suitable song lyric for each area (e.g. a part of "Money, Money, Money" by ABBA for banking and PayPal).
More information: https://www.bsi-fuer-buerger.de/BSIFB/DE/Empfehlungen/Passwoerter/passwoerter_node.html