Creating your own password algorithm

It’s pretty common to hear stories of passwords being hacked and it’s still surprisingly common for people to use the one password for everything. A lot of people use a password manager but if you are away from your regular device it can be a multi step process to log in.

I’ve been using my own password algorithm for a few years now. It means I generally have a unique password for each website and a way to remember what each password is. An algorithm is a set of rules applied to solve a problem.

Say I was creating a new account on Facebook. I would use the name of the website as a seed for the password. My rule might be; split the word Facebook up, swap the words, capitalise and then add a string that I remember. So a password for facebook becomes

BOOKFACEwordpass2018!!??

A password for LinkedIn might be

INLINKEDwordpass2018!!??

I might have to have an added rule, if I can’t easily swap the name of the website, just split it in half. So Twitter might be

TERTWITwordpass2018!!??

Now this algorithm isn’t perfect, one person could find one of my many compromised passwords on any number of services and figure it out. But this prevents your password being compromised everywhere and a internet bot cracking your accounts using a list of known passwords. It does mean if I create test accounts for the same service they tend to have the same password.

What do you use to manage your passwords?