Passwords are being cracked, hacked, and guessed all over the place these days - with so many resources being protected with just a single password, making sure you have a good one is absolutely critical. There are plenty of good articles online about creating secure, memorable passphrases but you're not on those sites right now so we're going to sum them up here. Good passwords are:
- hard to guess
- long (at least 8 characters or more)
- memorable (if you are not using a password manager)
- different for every website/service
So how do you create a long, hard to guess password that you can actually remember? Let's start with some don'ts:
- Do not use your name, or your kids' names, or your pet's names, or your business name or anything related to you in your password.
- Do not use days of the week, months of the year, seasons, or any kind of date in your password.
And now the do's:
- Combine at least two words together in the password - i.e. "close eagle"
- Make sure you include a combination of upper and lower case letters - i.e. "Cable Harvest"
- Add a string of numbers to your password - i.e. "Reflex Glacier 5823"
- Add a special symbol (! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ - +) to your password - i.e. "% Model Local 8983"
Once you have a solid password like the examples in steps 3 and 4, we strongly recommend using 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) where ever possible.