Before we dive into the how-tos of creating secure passwords, it's important to understand why you need a supersecure password to begin with. After all, you might be thinking, "Who would want to hack my accounts?"
There are a few ways your account passwords can be compromised.
Someone's out to get you. There are many people who might want to take a peek into your personal life. If these people know you well, they might be able to guess your e-mail password and use password recovery options to access your other accounts.
You become the victim of a brute-force attack. Whether a hacker attempts to access a group of user accounts or just yours, brute-force attacks are the go-to strategy for cracking passwords. These attacks work by systematically checking all possible passphrases until the correct one is found. If the hacker already has an idea of the guidelines used to create the password, this process becomes easier to execute.
There's a data breach. Every few months it seems another huge company reports a hacking resulting in millions of people's account information being compromised. And with the recent Heartbleed bug, many popular websites were affected directly.