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With a new hacking scandal in the news every other week, everyone should be concerned about the security of their online accounts. Here are a few simple techniques for creating strong passwords; and storing them.
Number 1 – How To Create a Strong Password
It’s very important to have a strong and powerful password. An awesome way of generating a strong password that is too hard to guess but still easy enough to remember is to devise a phrase that contains ordinary names, words of people or places (so they start with a capital letter) and also numbers.
Your password is then generated by taking the first letters of each word except: for the numbers which are represented by their figures. So, if your phrase was “California is close to Mexico” the password would be ‘CictM’.
One of the most important things (and I’m sure you’ve heard it before) is to avoid using the following types of passwords, which a surprising number of people use: password, QWERTY, 123456, 00000 and Letmein.
You can also substitute characters for numbers, symbols or punctuation. You could replace any letter ‘i’s with ‘!’s and any ‘a’s with ‘4’s and your password would become much harder to crack. For example, if you were to choose Christmas, it becomes Chr!stm4s, which is a much stronger password.
Great! You now have your secure password for each of your online accounts, now how do you store them all?
Number 2 – How To Store Your Passwords (Really Important)
With so many popular sites having different password requirements, the typical internet user has around 10 different combinations to remember, and these can easily build up over time!
Whats our solution? Well, we would highly recommend a secure password vault to store all of your details in one, secure location. This will easily help you avoid the annoyance of password resets or even a blocked account on your favourite site entirely!
There are many password vault services out there to use however some of the best around also offer additional layers of protection so you can get all in one security for your computer. Our number recommendation is TotalAV. But feel free to do your own research first and decide on the main features you need.