In today’s world almost everything you manage is online, anything from your social life to your bank account. Everyday using a unique personal password, people are logging into their online accounts whether it’s email, social media, or even to make a car payment. Choosing a secure password is a critical key to insure that you are safe from hackers and identity thieves. So here are three key elements for choosing a secure password.
Do be captain obvious
Do not choose an obvious password that anyone could guess, stay away from phone numbers, addresses, birth city and birthdays. General or dictionary words are not too safe as well. Hackers can easily decode these passwords.
Make it long and complex
Having a long complex password means that you have a secure password, a good secure password should range from 9 to 15 diverse characters. For example, *2avgjoe=4chaMp1 would be very difficult for hackers to crack at the same time it should be easy for you to remember. Use punctuation marks, numbers, symbols, capital and lower case letters and do not use a number pattern i.e 12345678123.
Managing and remembering passwords
Never use the same password for all your accounts, have a different one for each. Also, never share your password with anyone, and changing your password every couple of months is a good idea. We all tend to forget a password at one point if we haven’t logged in to the account in a while, that’s why I recommend keeping track of your online usernames and password for every account you manage. The best way to do this is to use password managing software that will store your usernames and passwords in an organized fashion and could also generate a strong and a secure password for you as well. PasswordSafe is a great free program that can be downloaded to your local computer. Another great online tool is Safestacks. These programs will help significantly in keeping you organized.
Today it is crucial to have a strong and secure password. The fact that people could be managing half their lives online, choosing a password is not something you should not take lightly.