If you own or work for a business, it often involves safeguarding data in one aspect or another. You probably have information related to your clients, customers, patients, vendors, contractors that needs to be securely protected.  This also applies to your own personal or business financial details.  A big step to help protect this valuable information is establishing passwords that cannot be easily hacked.  Below are some tips to create strong, secure passwords to help protect your business and personal information.

Make the password at least 12 characters long The longer the password, the better. Longer passwords are harder to crack.

Use a pass phrase Security experts are now recommending a pass phrase rather than simply a password. Such a phrase should be relatively long, 20 characters or so, and consist of random words strung together with numbers, symbols, upper and lower case letters.

Don’t just use one password. It’s possible that someone could see you use that password could pass it on or use it to break into your accounts at other sites.

Don’t use common passwords: Don’t use personal information such as your name, age, birth date, child’s name, pet’s name, or favorite color. Other common passwords not to use are P@ssword, number/letter sequences such as 123456, 111111, and abc123.

Don’t use obvious substitutions: Don’t use common substitutions, either — for example, “Bus1ness” isn’t strong just because you’ve replaced an I with a 1.

With a strong password strategy, you will be well on your way to preventing online attacks.

Kathy Storm

kstorm@stephanoslack.com

302-777-7400

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