You're constantly told how easy it would be to hack your weak passwords, but complicated passwords just aren't something our brains get excited about memorizing. Reader calculusrunner offers a brilliant tip that turns weak passwords into something much, much better.


His clever solution: Stick with your weak, dictionary password if you must; just move your fingers over a space on the keyboard.

If you want a secure password without having to remember anything complex, try shifting your fingers one set of keys to the right. It will make your password look like gibberish, will often add in punctuation marks, and is quick and simple.


When John Pozadzides showed us how he'd hack our weak passwords, he listed his top 10 choices for getting started hacking away at your weak passwords. Let's take a look at how a few of those popular passwords fare when run through calculusrunner's method:

password => [sddeptf

[sddeptf letmein => ;ry,rom

;ry,rom money => .pmru

.pmru love => ;pbr

Something longer but still really lame, like, say, "topsecretpassword", becomes "yp[drvtry[sddeptf". These may not be perfect compared to secure password generators, but they're likely orders of magnitude better than a lot of people's go-to passwords.

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[via #tips]