One of the most significant threats we face today in a digital world is keeping our information and accounts safe from intrusion. The single best action we can take to combat this individually is to have exceptionally strong passwords.
The challenge we all face is that cyber attackers have developed sophisticated and effective methods to guess passwords. This means bad guys can compromise your passwords if they are weak or easy to guess.
An important step to protecting yourself is to use strong passwords. This can be done by creating complex passwords. However, these can be hard to remember, confusing and difficult to type. Instead, we recommend you use 'passphrase'. A passphrase is a series of random words or a sentence. The more characters your passphrase has, the stronger it is. The advantage is these are much easier to remember and type, but still hard for cyber attackers to hack.
Here are two examples of passphrases:
Sustain-Easily-Practice
Time_for_tea_at_1:23
What makes these passphrases so strong is not only are they long, but they use capital letters and symbols. (Remember, spaces and punctuation are symbols.) At the same time, these passphrases are also easy to remember and type.
You can make your passphrase even stronger by replacing letters with numbers or symbols, such as replacing the letter ‘a’ with the ‘@’ symbol or the letter ‘o’ with the number zero. If a website or program limits the number of characters you can use in a password, use the maximum number of characters allowed.