Your poor passwords risk everyone’s privacy

Submitted by danorton on Sat, 07/09/2011 - 19:41

With social networking, and even with traditional email, your poor password can sacrifice everyone’s privacy. For social networking privacy, your must choose secure passwords for both your email acccount and your social networking account.

Do your passwords:

Consist of one or two family names or pet names?
Start or end with “123”?
Have all lower (or all upper) case letters?
Contain the year of your birth?
Contain words in the dictionary?
Contain other personal information that others might know?
Have less than 6 characters?

Passwords should be at least six characters long, better still to have eight or more characters. An ideal password is totally random, but few people can easily remember random sequences.

Follow these recommendations to create a secure password:

Include and memorize at least three random characters not at the end or beginning, but in the middle.
(Follow this link for random suggestions: Random characters)
Include at least one upper case letter: A-Z
Include at least one lower case letter: a-z
Include at least one decimal digit: 0-9
Include at least one special character:
e.g. ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + - = [ ] \ { } | ; ' : " < > ? , . / ` ~

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