Create a strong password

Create a strong password

A strong password is like a sturdy lock for your home. It protects your emails, files, and other content from being accessed by anyone but you.

Meet password requirements

With a few easy guidelines, you can create strong passwords to protect your account:

• Use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols (except symbols or characters with accents, like ñ or â).
• Avoid common passwords like “password123”; they will be easier to guess.
• Don’t create a password beginning or ending with a blank space.

Make your password unique

It’s important to always use a different password for each of your online accounts, like email and banking.

Reusing passwords could compromise your most personal information. If you use the same password for all your accounts and one has a password leak, you risk a hacker getting access to many of your accounts.

Make your password longer and more memorable

Long passwords are stronger, so make your password at least 12 characters long. Increasing a password from 8 characters to 12 dramatically increases its ability to prevent a bad actor from figuring it out.

To create a long password you won’t forget, you might use:

• A lyric from a song or poem
• A meaningful quote from a movie or speech
• A passage from a book
• A series of words that are meaningful to you
• An abbreviation: create a password using the first letter of each word in a sentence

Don’t forget to incorporate lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols into these options.

Don’t use personal info

Avoid creating passwords from information that others might know about you or could easily find out.

You should avoid using information like your nickname or initials, the name of your child or pet, your birthday or birth year, your phone number and your street name or street number. Avoid using any easily accessible information that people can learn from your social media profiles.

Don’t use common words & patterns

Make it harder to guess your password by avoiding very common words, phrases, and patterns. These might include words like “password” or “letmein”, sequences like “abcdef” or “123456”, or keyboard patterns like “qwerty” or “qazwsx”.

Store passwords securely

If you need to write your password down, don’t leave it on your computer or desk where someone could easily find it. Make sure any written passwords are stored somewhere secret or locked up securely.

Using a trusted password manager helps to make sure you’re using unique, strong passwords and storing them securely. additionally it may also check to see if you’re using weak passwords and recommends you update them.