Access Denied: Tips for Creating Strong and Secure Passwords

Hackers have all sorts of tools at their disposal when it comes to cracking other peoples accounts. You're only making their job easy if you use simple passwords. Learn a few useful password making techniques that will help to keep the hackers at bay.

How to make strong Passwords: Mix characters.casing.
Avoid using simple words and phrases that consist on of letters from the alphabet. Simplicity is not always a good thing. By using uppercase and lowercase letters, along with numbers and special characters, you can create an advanced password that is still fairly easy to recall.

Example: April is an okay month, but a down right horrid password. It's too short, lacks originality, and is a little too predictable. Changing the effectiveness of this password is as easy as adding a few special characters. April becomes ApR1.l7, or aRr.iL09, or A-R4Il76, etc.

How to make strong Passwords: 6 Month rule.
Change your passwords every 6 months. This would have to be the best measure of keeping your information secure. Recently there was a big list of email account passwords from Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo leaked on a phishing community message board.

If you've used either of those email services, you have nothing to worry about, as long as you go by the 6 month rule. That list was said to be at least a year or so old, and most of the information is probably outdated by now because of that.

How to make strong Passwords: Never recycle.
recycling is good for the environment, but could cause a lot of headaches if there was ever a security breach. Never reuse the same password for multiple accounts and services. If you do reuse passwords for different services, web sites, or anything else, I'd advise you to stop. It's highly unlikely that anything good will ever come of this.

Think about what would happen if you're PayPal password were the same as one you use for twitter or Facebook. If someone were to hack your accounts at one, and knew you had an account at the other, they could try to access it using that valuable information.

How to make strong Passwords: Never share your password.
Don't click on links that appear in suspicious emails, don't write down your password and leave the notes in highly trafficked work areas If somebody walk up to you, and just outright asked for your password, don't give it to them.