Tips on Choosing Good Passwords

With cyber attacks and stolen identities on the rise, your best line of defense is using strong passwords.  But if you’re like me, you forget your password as soon as you select it, and then you spend hours trying to remember it.  I used to keep my secret passwords in a Word document until I realized that anyone could find that on my computer by searching “password.”  UGH. So my IT guy recommended that I create unique passwords and store them in SafeInCloud, a secure password app.

Tips for Unique Passwords:

1. Use a different password for everything
2. Use long passwords: at least 8 characters – the longer the better!
3. Don’t use complete words
4. Use acronyms (abbreviation using initial letters of other words)
5. Replace certain letters with numbers or symbols
6. Don’t use your name, birthdates, pet’s or children’s names, company names

My IT guy once selected a password for our internet that seemed odd to me: 

Octopus+Lemon@de&Firecrackers

But he told me that it was good because it was really long, had upper and lower case letters, and numbers and symbols. So create unique passwords for every site, save them all in one place that is really secure, and don’t share passwords with anyone. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

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