Taken from PCWorld Magazine, November 2012

If you are like me, you probably haven’t changed the passwords you use in a while.  Your digital privacy is a critical part of your personal privacy, so making a few easy changes to the way you create passwords will pay off in peace of mind.

First, make sure that the password for your primary email account is strong and unique, yet easy to remember.  This means that names and birthdates are poor choices, because someone could guess the password using publicly available information. To create a unique password, think of it not as a single word but as a passphrase that you generate using the same method each time.  First, pick a phrase that is easy to remember, such as your hometown and the name of a pet.  Let’s use “Oakland Jack” as an example.  Multiple words are ideal, because the spaces serve as special characters but are easy to remember.  Next, add a site-specific tweak that ensures your passphrase is unique to that service.  So, for my Outlook password, we could use “ouOakland Jack7”.  Then, I could append the current year to the end of the passphrase.  So my password for Facebook could be “faOakland Jack82012”, which looks like gibberish but is easy to remember because I know the process that generated it.

No password is perfect, of course, which is why you should update yours as often as possible.