THE PERFECT PASSWORD

DOES IT EXIST?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is it depends.

Of course you could have an long password that’s a combination of letters, numbers and symbols such as ’87^’A&,G64zh’ and that’s a perfectly valid and strong password. But it’s hard to remember.

On the other hand, the password ‘6JumpingApesEatingApples’ is just as valid and strong, but much easier to remember.

We’ll tell you some Dos and Don’ts of choosing a password below to help you choose your own perfect password.

DO

• Use a long password. Because of the way hackers can guess your password, a longer password makes it harder for them!
• Use a password that’s easy to remember. If your password is “X4#B8HO” that’s pretty hard to remember. But “CorrectHorseBatteryStaple” is easy to remember as you can even think of a little picture to help.

• Use an alphanumerical password. This is a combination of both letters and numbers. These are hard to crack due to the random nature of the combination. For example “C0LLIN9Wo0d”
• Use a password manager. A password manager like OnePassword or Passpack.

DON’T

• Choose something easy to guess! Some of the most common (and easily guessed) passwords include “password” “user” “1234” “password1” and anything to do with your personal information such as your name of birthday. For example, if you email is “lastname_1980@gmail.com” don’t make your password “1980lastname”
• Use the same password for everything! If you use the same password for everything, all that means is that if hackers get into one of your accounts, they can get into all of them!
• Store your passwords where they could easily be found.

PASSWORD MANAGER?

We mentioned in our Do section that you should use a password manager like OnePassword or Passpack but what are they exactly?

OnePassword and Passpack are secure programs on your phone or your computer that stores all of your passwords. That way, all you need to do is remember the one password to get into the password manager and then you can get all of your other passwords from it.

In summary, use a password that is long, easy to remember and has a combination of both letters and numbers!