Secret code to storing all your passwords
GET HELP TO REMEMBER
THE curse of the forgotten password often strikes at the worst moment, just when you need it for paying a bill or making a website booking.
The temptation is to rely on easy-to-remember codes, perhaps using the names of pets or children. But such passwords are easy to crack by fraudsters who know most people use one code for all accounts.
Dominic O’Brien is eight times World Memory Champion and is included in the Guinness Book of Records for memorising the sequence of a record 54 packs of playing cards. He has no problem keeping hundreds of complex passwords in his head.
He says: ‘The secret is to use your imagination – ideally including a location and an odd situation so that an image stays stuck in your mind. It can help by turning shapes in an image into numbers.’
For example, he says if you want to remember a bank PIN number, you could visualise visiting your bank. Opposite this bank is a lake with two swans on it – each shaped like a ‘2’. You are seeing the bank manager at Christmas to ask for extra cash and he is dressed as a snowman – shaped like the figure ‘8’. The reason you have gone is that you have no money – ‘0’. From such a vision you can then create PIN ‘2280’.
ACTION PLAN: Ditch easy-tocrack codes. Instead, use your imagination – turning pictures in your mind into passwords.