Many people decide to choose a website password that is easy for them to remember and use the same password for access to all of the sites that they regularly visit. However, that is not a safe practice and can end up costing you, if you are not careful. Many experts recommend that you choose a strong password. What does that mean? First, don’t use the obvious in your password – like your first or last name, the names of your children or your pet. Second, don’t pick a year to include as the number. Although these are easier to remember, they are also a set up for trouble. Dates and names are out and using some sort of “system” is in. Some random set of letters, numbers or symbols works much better. Also, the longer, the better. Microsoft recommends having 14 or more characters!

Now you can probably come up with some great password like: xidpa0830!!apc0930 but how in the world will you remember that?!? Write it down. What? Yes, write it down. It is safer to write down your password and protect it than to save it on your computer and give countless numbers of hackers access to it. They don’t have access to the paper you wrote it down on and it makes your web experience up to 33,000 times stronger!

Here are 6 steps that are recommended in creating your unique password:

-Come up with a phrase or sentence that you can easily remember. Something like: “I wish we had three day weekends.” (By the way, don’t use this one, come up with your own);

-Now use the first letter of each word as the base of your password. In this case, you would use: “iwwhtdw” (weird, isn’t it)

-You can replace number words with actual numbers and use upper case as well. This could be changed to “iwWh3dw”

-Get even more creative by substituting some letters with symbols “!wWh3dw”

-Still not sure? You can find an online password checker that will tell you if your password is strong enough.

Happy surfing!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 7:57 am and is filed under Articles Concerning Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.