Please change your password!

Much fuss has been made about electronic security breaches in the news lately. Whether it be someones bank card being compromised, email hacked or identity stolen, most of them have one thing in common, they could have been prevented with stronger passwords.

I know, passwords are a pain. We pick ones that are easy to remember, but that leaves us vulnerable. Memorizing one good password is hard enough but do we really need a different password for each site? What makes a good password? As more and more of our lives are online from pictures, banking and social activities, these are all questions people should be asking more and more. Luckily, P.C. Tantrums is here to help with this quick guide for password hints and tricks.

Things to avoid:
Here are some of the things to avoid when thinking up a new password.
- Never use a birthday as the password.
- Don’t use pet, spouse or children’s names.
- Don’t use your company name as your password.
- Don’t use words that can be found in the dictionary.
- Don’t make it to short (6-10 letters is ideal)

The most commonly used passwords are:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

So we have gone over the donts, now lets figure out how to make a good password. First of all, we have to figure out what’s in a good password. A good password has the following characteristics:

- It has nothing to do with you.
- It is long.
- It has letters, numbers, a capital letter and preferably a symbol of some type like ! @ # or &.
- It is something you can remember.

Now I know what you’re saying. 1 threw 3 cancel out 4, but here are some ways to make them more memorable.

Tip 1:
Move everything to the right one. If you want your password to be fluffy, type the letters one space to the right of the letters you want. That way fluffy becomes g;iggu. You can even capitalize the first letter and that would give you three of the desired characteristics. It has nothing to do with you, it has a symbol and an upper case letter. Now if you could just make it longer and get a number in there, we would be off to the races.

Tip 2:
Substitute numbers for letters. If you want your password to be Mississippi, replace all of the s’s with 5′s making it Mi55i55ippi. That would be a lot harder to guess.

Tip 3:
Take the first letters of the first ten words in your favorite song, capitalize the first one and add a number at the end. Still requires some memorization, but it’s easier to remember over time.

These are just a few tips to help make a more secure password. Alternatively there are simple but powerful tools that can help you generate and keep track of your passwords like my personal favorite LastPass, but I will write more about that in a future post.

I hope this post has helped educate one not only the importance of maintaining a secure password, but provided easy tips on how to make one.

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to email us and we would be more than happy to see if we can lend a hand.