A strong password is one of the most important precautions you can take in protecting you and your information. Weak passwords are easily cracked, which could give a hacker access to your accounts, whether email, Banner, Workday, bank or other. A hack attack could result in someone stealing your identity, compromising your computer and enlisting it in a botnet that sends spam with your name, or committing a data breach of Brown's information, leaving you to deal with all the legal and financial repercussions.

A strong password should be easy to remember but hard to guess. 

One way to do this is with a passphrase, i.e., a longer and therefore stronger password made up of a string of randomly selected words (such as “basketball paper absorbed exciting aquatic”), or a set of words that mean something to you but would appear random to others (for example, gutsyfootprinthoundintuition might have been a password for Arthur Conan Doyle).

Another example of how to balance the twin factors of easy to remember but hard to guess comes from a lover of musicals, who used the first line of the song "My Favorite Things", i.e., Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens to create: RnDpzoRz&)(Nk10