5 Smart Ways to Safely Store and Recall Your Passwords

It looks like these days you need a password for everything, from your email to your bank account to your video service.

Once you make a new one, it can be hard to keep track of them. If you want to remember your password, do these smart and safe things.

Having only two passwords is a small and dangerous number, but it makes sense since it’s annoying to keep track of a lot of them.

Does this sound like you: you make a new password and then forget it? So you set it back up. But soon you forget that password too, which starts a painful cycle of making new ones that are hard to remember over and over again.

“It’s the number one reason that people end up creating weak passwords or reusing passwords,” he said. He runs the business RYMARK IT Navigation as a senior partner.

How can we keep our passwords safe? Sommerfeld thinks the answer is easy.

“The number one recommendation I would have is using a password manager app,” he stated.

Apps that keep track of your passwords secure them so that only you can see them. Also, they make codes that are different for each account. The apps that Sommerfeld’s company suggests are BitWarden, Dashlane, and LastPass.

Sommerfeld doesn’t agree with the idea of using passwords you already know.

“Now that you’re trying to remember the password, you start making them easier and shorter.” He said, “You could write your birthday or the name of your pet.”

It’s easy to hack if you make it easy to remember your password. Writing them down on a piece of paper is another mistake. Someone else could see or lose the paper. Making a digital file with all of your passwords and keeping it on your phone or computer is also a bad idea.

How do you make a strong password? Some of the best methods are:

Write a lot of words, 12 to 15
Type in numbers, symbols, and capital and small letters.
Don’t use things that are known to you, like pet names, birthdates, or sports teams.

“If somebody can look at your Facebook page and get details about you, don’t use any of those details that they would be able to find about you,” he said.

Last but not least, use two-factor security and app-based authentication if you can.

“In the case where you password gets breached, hacked, or found there is a second layer protecting that account for you,” he said.