How do I find a secure password?

How to create a strong password:

1. Think of a sentence that you can easily remember. Pluto may no longer be a planet, but many people still remember this mnemonic from school:
   My father explains to me every Sunday our nine planets.
2. Write down only the first letters:
   MfetmESonp
3. Add your birth year, the year you got married, or your graduation year at the beginning:
   88MfetmESonp
4. Add a special character at the end:
   88MfetmESonp+
5. This can now form the basis for your passwords for different services. Add about three letters from the service or app you need the password for to the beginning of the password. For example, use "out" to secure your Outlook account and "tel" when you log in to Telekom.

When it comes to passwords, length matters

Hackers use specialized programs that automatically try combinations of letters and numbers. That is why length and the number of character combinations are crucial. 

A modern PC can easily generate more than 2 billion keys per second. A password made up of only seven lowercase letters has 26 ⁷ possible passwords. There are 26 letters, each of which can be combined with all 26 other letters in every position of the password. That is more than 8 billion combinations. An attacker's system would only need about 4–5 seconds to crack it.

If a password has 13 characters and uses uppercase and lowercase letters as well as numbers, there are 62 ¹³ possible combinations (26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, and 10 numbers). The system would have to calculate for more than 3 million years to determine every possible password!