For virtually every account you have online or on the computer network of your business you need a password. They have simply become a part of every day life. Unfortunately, the need to create ultra strong passwords has become every bit as, if not more, important that just creating a password itself. More and more stories continue to surface highlighting the dangers of using weak passwords and many of these stories often include the horror someone went through when their accounts got hacked.

So how do you create a password that is easy enough for you to remember but that is also strong? Let's walk through a few steps you can take to create the perfect password for you.

1. Choose a password with decent length

The longer a password is, the tougher it is to crack. If you need to select something that is familiar to you such as a pet name, feel free to use that. Just make sure that it is long enough. For example, let's say our password is just simply "password". It.s an eight character long password which might seem long enough, but we can lengthen it to make it even stronger like this - "thisismypassword". Now we have created a password that's even tougher than before.

2. Add numbers at the end

Adding numbers at the end of your password is a great way to make it tougher to crack. Choose a combination of numbers that you can remember easily and, if possible, use more than one. Each character you add increases the complexity of your password making it more difficult to crack. Using our example, we will add two numbers to our password, "thisismypassword". Remember to choose numbers you will remember. For the example, I will add "14" to the end of the password, which happens to be my wife's birth date, making it "thisismypassword14".

3. Use capital letters

Many passwords will utilize upper and lower case letters. This can make your password even more difficult to crack without you having to add a lot of characters to it, which might make it harder to remember. For our example, I will simply capitalize the first letter of each word. Thus "thisismypassword14", becomes "ThisIsMyPassword14".

4. Replace letters with symbols

One of the best ways to create one of the strongest passwords possible is to simply replace letters in your password with symbols. Try and use symbols that resemble the letters in your password as this will help you remember. For our password, I will replace all the occurrences of the letter "i" with "1" and all of the instances of the letter "s" with "$". By doing this, "ThisIsMyPassword14" becomes "Th1$1$MyPa$$word14". Feel free to change as many of the letters as you like, for example, the 'o' could become '0'. The more you change, the more secure your password becomes.

Our results

How much more secure is our password over the original? In our example, our original password began as simply "password", has now been changed to be "Th1$1$MyPa$$word14". As you can see, these few changes to a very insecure password created a complicated password that will be very difficult to break.

It's paramount that you create very secure passwords in case of any type of security breach. The more secure your password, the more difficult it is for hackers to break it. Even with just a few little changes you can create a highly secure password that is easy to remember and type. Use one or more combinations of these tips to create the perfect password for your systems that even the best hackers will have difficulty cracking.