Bruce Schneier walks readers through the process hackers use to crack passwords. Basically, they’ve gotten very good a guessing – even common tricks won’t stop modern brute force guessing apps. Schneier’s recommendations for picking a secure password that is hard to guess are absolutely worth considering.

If you don’t use a password manager like 1Password, you should. And for the truly paranoid, make sure you never use your master password anywhere else and, if at all possible, make it as secure as you can using some of the tips Schneier mentions.