Creating a strong password

You may be wondering, why do I even need a strong password? The truth is that even though most websites are secure, there’s always a small chance someone may try to access or steal your information. This is commonly known as hacking. A strong password is one of the best ways to defend your accounts and private information from hackers.

Here are some tips for creating strong, unique passwords that will keep your personal information safe online:

DO

•             Use long passwords – they are harder to crack. Aim for eight or more characters.

•             Use variety – the greater variety of characters in your password, the better. A strong password will include a combination of lower and upper case letters, a special character (for example: $, #, *), and a number.

•             Change your passwords regularly – set an automatic reminder to change them every few months.

DON’T

•             Use the same password for more than one account – if hackers are able to obtain your online password for one account, they can run software to try the same email/password combination for all your other accounts.

•             Use common words that can be found in any English or foreign dictionary.

•             Use words spelled backwards, common misspellings or abbreviations – for example: koolpassword or retupmoc.

•             Use sequences or repeated characters – for example: 123ABC or qwerty.

•             Use any of your personal information –  for example do not use your name, yours or your family’s birthdays, your street name or your passport number.

Some creative solutions to keeping track of all your passwords
Create a short phrase that you are likely to remember. For example, Lisa Nichols publishes Woopi News every 4 weeks. Now, simply take the first character from each word to create your password, where the example would become LNpWNe4w. Notice how there is a mixture of upper case, lower case, numerals, and just to be sure, you can put a special character at the end, to create a strong password like: JSwm30coF*.

Another example, Valaxus office is now at 3 Willis Road Woolgoolga, will become Voina3WRW. Once again, adding a random, special character will add to the strength of your password, so this password becomes: #Voina3WRW. These types of passwords are extremely strong, as they are very long and do not use common English words.

Wayne – Geek Monkey Computers Woolgoolga 0490 776 643