Create a Strong Password
A strong password or passphrase is a critical backbone in a multi-layered approach to protecting you and your personal information. Here's a simple strategy for creating a strong password that can be simple to remember and hard for a criminal to guess.
Qualities of a strong password:
Length - Strong passwords are going to be built of a minimum of 8 characters. In this case more is better. Each letter you add increases the protection the password provides.
Complex - Strong passwords combine different types of letters, numbers and symbols in great variety. Use the whole keyboard to create a password with a variety of characters that will be hard to guess
Hard to guess - Easy to remember, and it is ok to write your passwords down, but please keep them secret.
Password Dont's
Don't use sequences or repeat characters.
Don't use common substitutions of letters like "@" for"a."
Please don't use your name or any part of it, you social security number, birthday, name of your dog cat parrot little sister mother or brothers girlfriends sisters aunts nickname...Please?
Don't use a word out of a dictionary.
Don't use one password for all of your various accounts...it gets compromised you have to consider all of your accounts compromised.
Avoid using password recovery questions that many sites offer and think very carefully about the answers you do use..
Don't store your passwords in a file on your PC...if it gets stolen the criminals have full access to all of your accounts.
Simple Strong Password Strategy:
Use a little creativity when creating a strong password.
1. Start with a phrase like..."little Jimmy ran across the street to play"
2. Turn the sentence into a password by using the first letter of each word. The password would then be ljratstp.
3. Make it complex by substituting or capitalizing letters so that ljratstp could become lJrAt&tp
4. Now that you've created a nice strong password...keep it secret!
Using these strategies, or variations of, will help keep you and your information a bit safer in the information age.