We older people have a problem with passwords because unlike our grandchildren we did not grow up with the concept of gaining access to something by knowing a code. This results in two distinct problems.

The first is knowing the importance of having a safe and secure password that no-one else knows.  Many of us bank online, order books from the library online, have facebook pages, and purchase presents online. For all these things you must have a password, and it should be something that other people cant guess, or work out. Guessing a password is much easier than you might think.  For example, many web sites now insist that a password should have numbers as well as letters. This means that “Frederick” will no longer suffice, so we, the uninitiated use “Frederick1″ as our password.  This is definitely NOT a secure password. To be reasonably secure a password should be at least 8 characters long, with upper and lower case letters, special characters and numbers.

The second problem is one of memory. As we get older our short term memory declines, and we remember clearly only the things we learnt in our youth, so having a password such as “RjL38k,14″ while good in theory is useless in practice because we cannot remember it.

So how can we devise a password that we can remember. I said that our long term memory was still good, so probably like me you remember the first line of a popular song or a hymn you sang at school. Let us take a couple of examples. Hey Jude by The Beatles begins “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad”. This consists of 6 words, 2 short of the 8 I suggested as being valid for a password. A popular hymn which most people know at least the first line of is “Abide With Me” and the first line is “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” 7 words long.

Although the lines are not 8 words long they have punctuation marks and because they are lines from songs when you repeat them you will pause at the comma, thus remembering it. So we use the first letter of each word and include the punctuation giving us “hj,dmib” and “awm,ffte”. These are already reasonably secure passwords but we can make them more so by changing some letters to capitals. So which shall we change? Jude is a personal name so we think of it with a capital letter, and we stress the word “bad” when we sing it, so let’s change those two – “hJ,dmiB”. In the other phrase we could make the nouns or the verbs capitalised – you just have to decide which and stick to it. Say we decide to make verbs capitals. The verbs in this phrase are Abide and Falls thus making the password “Awm,fFte”. If we were to change the nouns it would become “awM,fftE”. Now you have to add a number that you wont forget, say the year your first grandchild was born, say 2007, or the year your mother was born, say 1921 and add this to the code – giving you “awM,fttE2007″ and “hJ,dmiB1921″.

I cannot guarantee that your password is totally secure, but it will take more than a casual attempt to break it, and it is definitely better than “12345678″ or “password” – two of the most common passwords currently in use. Until now I have used a system of passwords which consisted of an actual English word with letters transformed to numbers – for example “what a view” became “whataview” and then I transformed i to 1 and e to 3 giving “whatav13w”. This is better than it was, but not good, so now I am altering all my passwords to the system I have shown you here.

And no, I am not using either of the two examples given and shall not tell you the phrase I am using . Always keep your password confidential, never tell it to anyone and your safety on the internet while not assured is at least more secure than it was.

Good luck.