Choosing a secure password

Choosing a secure password is straightforward. Forget the stories about special characters, upper and lower case and using numbers. Special characters are no bad thing, of course, but these days only two factors really matter when picking a password — which means you need not make it hard on yourself.

1. Length

Make the password long enough. Use 16 characters or more to make your password secure.

2. The combination

Simply avoid words that appear in the dictionary, or that can be pronounced.

Examples

An excellent password would be something like Z8jXjJJY638MMm5q — though that is hard to remember, obviously. Training yourself is one option, but you can also choose something simpler. You don't want a password as simple as "MyComputer": 16 characters, certainly, but hardly secure, since the words are in the dictionary. "easy4h@ckers" is no safer an alternative either, because it is easy to pronounce. You could instead drop the last letter of every word in a sentence: "IHaveBuiltAWebsite" becomes "IHavBuilAWebsit". Or take the first letter of each word in a sentence: "I like to take a walk through the woods with my whole family" becomes "Ilttawttwwmwf".

Why not special characters?

Using special characters, capitals, digits and so on is certainly not a bad idea, but it adds very little. A 14-character password full of special characters is roughly as secure as a 16-character password without any. So if you don't mind, go ahead — it is just usually simpler to make the password slightly longer.

Changing passwords

Changing passwords periodically is entirely pointless, too. Our advice is to change a password only when it is insecure or when it may have been exposed. Check here whether your password may already be out in the open.