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I’ve come to realize that in today’s world people are worried about identity theft and invasions of privacy, but they fail to protect themselves on a very basic level… their passwords.  The password you use for your credit card site or bank account login is just as important as shredding your credit card statements after you’ve looked through them. I’ve seen too many people recently that use their address or pet name in all lower case letters as their password and it drives me nuts.  It’s time to take that extra step in protecting yourself and create yourself a strong password.

Creating a strong password is a fairly simple process that most people seem to skip over for the convenience of having an easy password to remember.  Now your password should be pretty easy for you to remember but it should be hard for someone to guess.  You should stay away from making your password something that can easily be found out about you such as your address or birthday.  Passwords are supposed to protect your information so it would be in your best interest to make you password something that someone can’t just type in because they know you and guess the correct password.   So here are a few things you should consider before making your password or changing your already existing password.

Use a combination of upper and lowercase letters in your password.  Thes should be spread out and not follow the normal way that grammar teaches us.  Put a capital letter in the middle or end of the word to spice things up.

Use numbers in your password as well.  You should put numbers in the middle of your password, not at the beginning or end.  This will make it more difficult for someone to guess whatever word you use for your password because the number in the middle will throw them off.

If the website you use allows it you should also put a symbol somewhere in your password.  Any symbol will do as long as it is allowed by the site.  These can be placed near the end of your password as an extra step in making sure you’ve got a strong password.

A good rule for strong password creation is to use numbers as letters and to add the letters of the website you’re using to ensure that you can remember what site each password is for.  You can use a similar password for each site you use, just make sure to change the letters relating to the site for each password.  For example, if you were to make a password for this site, you could do something like “t3Chn0logy!Ett” or “e@SyTecHt@lK”, notice how both passwords have upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols in them.

Also, you should make sure that you don’t keep your passwords with your login information written on post-its next to your monitor or keyboard.  That’s just making it too easy for someone to know all the information they need to get into your account.  If you are going to write the login and password on something, try to write them in random locations on the bill of the site you need them for, or write them in an address book under the letters of the website they correspond to.

Remember that your password should be easy for you to remember but hard for someone to guess.  If you are going to use something like a pet or car, try to mix up the letters so you password doesn’t resemble the original word.  You can check out this site for random password generation.