How to Pick a Strong Password

Knowing how to choose a strong password is essential to protecting your sensitive information, and strengthening your computer and online security. There are a few key things to avoid when choosing a strong password, however, it will be easier to understand how to choose a strong password when you understand how hackers compromise people's passwords.

How the hackers do it:

When a hacker is trying to get into a victim's account, there are various methods they can use to go about doing that, it depends on what the hacker wants, this can just be a broad attack -an inelegant mad dash using the law of averages to guess a password,(a relatively easy attack to thwart) or, it can be a surgical highly targeted attack on one user. (Slightly harder to combat)

When a hacker goes for the broad attack they utilize programs that repetitively try words from a "Dictionary file". A dictionary file is an enormous list of words, hundreds of thousands of them. Dictionary files can reach sizes greater than 10 Gigabytes. (For a point of reference the download for the English version of Wikipedia, in it's entirety, is 9.7 gigabytes) Dictionary files can have hundreds of the same word for instance Password, Password1, Password_1, password1, etc, etc.

When a hacker goes for the targeted attack all of the information about you that they can get their hands on will be used to try and find your password. Most people's Facebook profiles are rife with information, birth date, hometown, interests, family member's names, your spouse's names. You may be reading this and thinking to yourself something along the lines of "I have a Facebook account I'm in trouble" don't worry, by following a few simple guidelines you can choose a strong password.

What Not To use as a password:

Your own name, or your username, or for that matter any name.

The name of your significant other.

Something that would be in a dictionary.

Something related to your interests, hobbies, or occupation.

What You should use:

A random combination of lowercase and capital letters.

Special characters eg!@#$%&()_-+=

Long Phrases with spelling errors eg "mareehadaliddlelam"

Something you can remember

Replace numbers with letters eg "MyN4M3155am" for "My Name Is Sam"

Congrats, you now know how to choose a strong password! Having a strong password is great but its only half the battle for password safety, like all computer security, there's still the behavioral aspect to deal with.

NEVER EVER M mean EVER TELL ANOTHER PERSON YOUR PASSWORD, for any reason what so ever. I know you trust your friends, and they're great, but just don't.

DON'T WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORDS. They shouldn't be that hard to remember and chances are if you have a password that is a random meaningless string of numbers and letters a computer could randomly generate it faster than a long phrase with spelling errors.

Just because you have one strong password does not mean you can use it for every account you have, i repeat DON'T USE ONE PASSWORD FOR EVERYTHING. If a hacker gets the password to one of your accounts, and all of your accounts have the same password, you've just helped them get away with your sensitive information.

And Finally, change your password regularly. The more secure you want the account to be, the more frequently you have to change the password. A good rule of thumb is every three months for your primary Email account.