Nobody wants their personal financial details, business information or photographs to be stolen or held to ransom, so simple things like using three or more words, a mixture of numbers, letters and symbols, upper and lower case letters will make it much more difficult for hackers to access your details.
Director of the National Crime Agency (NCA) National Cyber Crime Unit Jamie Saunders
The challenge is how to make a password sufficiently hard (if not impossible) to crack while at the same time making it easy enough for you to remember.
- Making it hard to crack - Use three random unrelated words as the basis of the password. Use a mixture of upper and lower case letters, as well as numbers and symbols. This increases of combination of characters used making it harder for a hacker to try each permutation when attempting to break your password.
- Making it easy to remember. Tips for creating memorable passwords include:
- Location method - Imagine a familiar scene and place each item to be remembered in a particular location: glass on the table, sock on bed, photo on desk for example. Imagine yourself looking around the room in the required sequence. Re-imagine the scene and the location of each item when you need to remember the items. Use these items as the three words of your password. G!45550c<ph0t0
- Acronyms - Use a phrase or a sentence and take the first letter from each word in that phrase or sentence to form your password. I want to remember this very strong password. !wtRtV5P
- Narrative methods - Remember a sequence of key words by creating a story and littering it with memorable details e.g. ‘the ginger cat hissed at the big black rat in the sewer’ which can also be combined with the Acronyms method eg tGcH4tbbR!t5
It is vital to use a different password for each login. In reality this means using a password manager or a password vault application which allows you to remember one strong master password that you can use to encrypt, protect and access the others.
More advice is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/three-quarters-of-britons-risking-online-safety
https://www.cyberstreetwise.com/