How To Make Your Passwords More Secure

 Passwords are used by millions of people every day and are essential to the security of your information. Chances are, your password isn’t as secure as you think it is. This is especially true if you’re using passwords such as:

  • Dates like: your birthday, anniversary, or your children's birthdays

  • Your children’s names, pet names, or even your name

  • Passwords containing “abc...etc.”, “abc123”, or “1234”

While you want your passwords to be easy to remember, you want to make sure they’re hard to guess. So, for example, your favorite color is blue. That’s easy to remember, right? However, when formatted like this: “Myfavoritecolorisblue” it would be way too easy for someone attempting to gain access to your account to guess. Let’s try replacing some of those letters with other characters like numbers or symbols to make it a harder to guess. That would look something like: “MyF@v0r!teC0l0r15B1uEe,” which allows you to keep easy-to-remember passwords but makes it difficult for someone else trying to get into your account. A few other things to remember when making your new password:

  • Never use the same password for multiple accounts. If someone manages to guess it, they’ll be able to gain access to all of your accounts.

  • The longer your password is, the better! It’s recommended to use 8 or more characters.

  • Get creative! Use different characters in place of letters. (like in the example above)

  • Always set up two-factor authentication when available. This prevents bad actors from gaining access to your account even if they have the correct password.

Even if your password is easy to remember, if you’re anything like me, you may forget it. The good news is they make applications for that! If you need a secure way to store your passwords you could always use something like 1Password to store your passwords. It will make secure passwords for you and even autofill them for you! Now go out and make those passwords secure!

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