What is your password? You probably don’t want to tell them that, and rightly so. Keeping your password secret is important, but we have often not chosen a watertight option. Once a year it’s Change Your Passwords Day, so you can’t be hacked easily.
Your password
There is a good chance that your password is your pet’s name, your nickname, the name of a family member, a date of birth or a combination of two or more from this list. Or your password is literally ‘password’, ‘123456’ or the longer version ‘1234567890’. You can already guess that this is not a waterproof password. Your password is important: it is your personal key to access your social media, email and much more. It is therefore never fun if you can no longer access it because your password has been hacked. Fortunately, we have a number of tips to change your passwords.
1. Be creative
Need a password with a capital letter? Then you capitalize the first letter. A password with a number? Then you paste your favorite number behind it. A password with a special character? Then you put an exclamation point after that, right? Wrong: Of course, a hacker could think of that too. Therefore, try not to make obvious choices, but put a number, capital letter or special character in the middle of the password. Also, don’t use ‘3’ before an ‘E’, or a ‘!’ before an ‘i’: that is also too easy. Incorporate the additions in an illogical place, for example by splitting a word.
2. Long passwords
The longer, the better. Sometimes the minimum length of a password is set to six or eight characters, but not always. If this is the case, try to exceed the required number by writing the password twice in a row or using multiple punctuation marks.
3. Use a passphrase
A good way to choose longer passwords that you can remember is to create a sentence. Of course, don’t use one word, but a whole sentence. You can connect your words with a dash to get the required special characters, and yes you can add numbers and capital letters. So instead of ‘pets’, you can use ‘2Dogs-and-1Cat’.
