Here's one my very best tips, never before
published anywhere.
Many people use the same password for all their online
accounts. That's convenient, but it's insecure. If you
always use the same password then a rogue employee at
any website you have an account with could have
access to all your accounts. It's safer to have a
unique password at every site you have an account with,
but then you'd have to keep a big list of passwords
somewhere and look up your password every time you need
to log on somewhere. That's pretty inconvenient.
So here's my solution: Use passwords based on
the initials of the website you're logging in to, plus
some other characters. Now you've got a unique
password for every site you log into, and you'll know it
without having to look it up.
For example, let's make our password the initials of
the website you're logging into plus the characters
"637uuu". For your Yahoo Mail account, your password
would be ym637uuu, and for your PayPal account it
would be pp637uuu.
That's already very secure, but you can go one step
further. You can split up the initials, putting them on
opposite ends of the password: Initial #1 + 637uuu +
Initial #2. So with that method we'd have y637uuum
or p637uuup.
For extreme security you can go even further, by using
"637uuu" in certain circumstances and "429elf" in others.
Or you could shift the initials of the website in
question forward by one letter, so that "ym" would become
"zn", and "pp" would become "qq".
The possibilities for methods and variations are
endless. But whatever you choose, you've got a unique
password for every website you log onto, and it's a
password you know without having to look it up. Neat!