PC Security

Security Your PC

The Do’s and Don’t's of Creating Safe Passwords

Your personal passwords are the keys to accessing information you stored on your PC or online accounts. Creating safe passwords is important to prevent malicious users from stealing this information and using your name and account to open credit cards, apply for mortgage, or steal your identity for online transactions.

In most cases, these identity theft attacks may occur without you knowing it, until it becomes too late. To prevent this from happening, create strong passwords and keep them well protected. By sticking to the following guidelines, it will ensure that you will never encounter such attacks.

* Lengthy passwords – The more characters you add to your password – may it be letters, numbers or symbols – the safer your password will become. An average password should be at least eight or more characters.

* Character Combo – By combining letters, numbers or symbols, you are making it difficult for malicious users to guess your passwords.

* Character variations – If you use fewer kinds of characters in your password, the longer it should be. A 20-character password made up of random numbers and letters is about 35,000 times stronger than a 10-character password made up of a combination of letters, numbers and symbols.

* Maximize the keyboard – If you press down the “shift” button, a variety of symbols can be added to your password to make it stronger. These symbols can include punctuation marks or any symbols that are unique to your language.

* Avoid repeated characters – Passwords such as “4444”, “1234”, “abcdefghij”, or any adjacent letters on the keyboard does not make your passwords secure.

* Look-alike substitutions – Malicious users who may possibly crack your passwords cannot be fooled by look-alike replacements, such as replacing “o” with “0”, “s” with “$” or “a” with “@” as in “P@$$w0rd”. However, if you wish to include look-alike substations, strengthen your passwords by adding case variations, misspellings and character length.

* Login names – Avoid using any part of your name, social security number or birthday. These kinds of data are the first things criminals will try to guess.

In developing a strong password, think of a sentence that you will not forget, such as “my daughter is three feet tall”. If password systems support phrases, use your sentence as a password and add spaces between each character. Conversely, if the system cannot recognize phrases or sentences, convert the sentence into a password, such as “mditft” or “mdi3ft”.

After creating a strong password, always remember your passwords by heart or write them down. Contrary to popular belief, writing down passwords is not that dangerous – as long as you keep them safe from other users.