We are in an age now where anything can be online from your address details to your current bank account information and even balance.
So what do we have to do? Well, the first and most important thing we can do is to keep our passwords strong, and difficult to guess. It can be an easy task but also it’s one that we can neglect in fear of choosing something that’s maybe too easy to forget.
Here are some tips on choosing a strong password:-
- It is better to stay away from commonly guessed words such as ‘password’, ‘admin’ or ‘qwerty’.
- Try not to use personal information that could be publicly available, such as your surname and date of birth (i.e Smith1986).
- Try not to use strings of numbers or even sequential numbers with words preceding them like ‘111111’, ‘0123456789’, ‘Password1234’ or ‘Admin9876’
- Use a mix of upper case and lower case letters, for example ‘PassWoRd’ SecURity’ or ‘AdmIN’
- Don’t make them too short, the longer the password, the more difficult it is to guess, a recommended length is around 12 characters
- Use special characters if you can like ‘!’ or ‘@’
- Substitute letters for either numbers or other characters ‘Pa55w0rd’ or ‘@dm1n’ these make words a little tougher to guess.
- To make your passwords a little more difficult to guess try to stay away from words that are in the dictionary. One method is to take a sentence or even part of a song and use the first letter from each word. In this case using the first two lines from the chorus of ABBA’s Mama Mia your password would be ‘mmhigammhciry’ (Mamma Mia, here I go again. My my, how can I resist you?)If we take that and use some of the tips from above you can get ‘Mmh!g4MmHc1rY?’.
People trying to crack passwords have tools which can look through dictionaries, commonly used phrases and sequential numbers. By avoiding these we are making it more difficult for someone or another computer to guess the password we’ve chosen.