Below are a variety of formulas that people often use to create passwords which are easy to guess and therefore easy to hack!
- Sequences – Try not to use sequences of letters or numbers as they are very easy to guess. E.g, ’123456789′ or ‘abcdefg’ or ‘ddddddd’
- Look-alike – It is always good to use look-alike symbols instead of letters, e.g. ‘a’ is ‘@’. However, we only recommend doing this when you combine them with a variation of letter cases. No professional account hacker will be fooled by ‘i’ as ’1′.
- Personal Details – Don’t use your personal or family member details as your password. E.g, name, date of birth, address, username/login name. Hackers will try this information first.
- Dictionary – Hackers are now using some top quality software that can guess passwords from dictionary’s in all type’s of languages, even if the word is spelt backwards, misspelt and includes substitutions.
- Variation – We recommend that you have a few passwords instead of using just one for everything. If one system is hacked into, and you use the same password for everything you may as well consider every account that you have on the Internet as hacked.
- Storage – many people are beginning to use online storage. We would heavily discourage this. If your online storage is hacked into you may have personal documents saved. Consequently they will all be accessed by the criminal.
Finally, don’t forget to check the strength of your password with the Microsoft Password Checker!