Strong passwords are the foundation of protecting your identity online. Passwords that can be easily guessed or easily broken by a hacking program, will leave your information laid bare to any hackers that might be trawling for your information.
Where you might have been able to get away with a pet’s name and a string of numbers before, now you need to make sure that your password has a variety of numbers, letters, and special characters.
Here are some of the criteria you should consider when picking a new password:
Length
The longer your password is, the harder it is going to be to crack.
Keep in mind that the person trying to crack your password is not sitting down and individually typing passwords into a field. They are using a program that runs strings of word and number combinations through those fields until one clicks.
The longer your password is, the more difficult it is going to be for that program to find the right combination of characters to break it.
Words
Using a string of words that you know by heart seems like a good way to remember your password—but it’s also a good way to make your password easier to crack. Famous movie lines, sayings, clichés, and quotes are all bad choices for passwords. A random string of words (or words that make sense only to you) are a much better bet.
Repetition
Use each password only once. Why? Because at some point a web service that you use will be hacked. A web service you use probably already has been hacked.
Your personal data and password will then be available. If you use that same password and personal information elsewhere, that web service then becomes vulnerable, too. So try not to make your password the same across different profiles and accounts.
