How To: Pick a Secure Password

In a nutshell, your password should be at least 8 characters long (we require 6) and contain upper and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation. Choosing a secure password is very important. If your account is compromised, a malicious user could access your data and files.

The following are our hints for picking a secure password:

1. Do not use words or phrases

   Steer clear of using words that you’re likely to find in a dictionary, as a dictionary is often used as the basis of hacking attempts.

2. Mix numbers, symbols and different cases

   If you limit your password to six lowercase letters, there are only 309 million possible passwords. This may sound like a lot to me or you, but a computer would be able to generate this complete list in a matter of seconds, and such lists often form an important part of password cracking programs.

   By including uppercase letters, digits, and punctuation, this number grows to almost 690 billion — that’s more than two thousand times more possibilities.

3. Pick a longer password

   The longer your password, the more difficult it is to guess. There are only 309 million possible six letter passwords (if you only use lowercase letters), but if you add an extra two letters to the password, there are suddenly 208 billion possibilities.

4. Make it memorable

   You still need to somehow remember your password. One way of remembering complex passwords is to come up with some kind of pneumonic — the password “Ia1o14c,MS” could be remembered as “I am 1 of 14 children, Mister Smith”.