You probably have heard that to be secure in our online world, you need to do a lot of things that seem like a hassle. Yes! These things ARE a hassle but if you can take a few extra seconds to make sure your accounts are secure, you are going a long way toward being safer from hackers. Surely you take a few seconds to lock your door when you leave your house to keep thieves out?
Our system does have a few requirements for passwords and that is to keep people from using horrible passwords like…. “password”. We would like to provide you with a few tips on how to make better passwords.
You can keep it short to 8 characters here at ILJ Mail but we suggest going longer than that if you can (even up to 30 characters).
Here’s an 8 character password that meets our requirements: pTg7Yw98
You can make it more secure by adding special characters and/or making it longer. pTg&Yw98j#ms but that gets harder to remember, doesn’t it!
You can make it more memorable. Here’s a great cartoon by XKCD that has been passed around for a long time.
Our system here at ILJ Mail requires at least one upper case letter and a number to be in the mix, but other than that, you can create a secure password that will be easy to remember once you glance at it. Let’s try this. How about:
CommonButterflyRoundup87
That’s a 24 character password that meets our system requirements here at ILJ Mail and would be very hard to guess. If you want to get even more secure throw in a special character or two like this:
CommonButterfly@Roundup!87
So there you go! You can make passwords short or long. More simple or super complicated. The longer the password is, the more secure it is because it makes it harder and harder to guess even for computers going through every combination it knows. Yes, it can be inconvenient but a little inconvenience to keep your accounts safe is really worth it.
Password Managers: Last, but not least, we encourage you to look into a password manager such as LastPass or Dashlane. You only have to remember one password for the password manager and it remembers all the rest of them for you. It’s a nice addition to your security measures as our lives are more and more in the digital realm. Do your research on the many such programs out there and choose one that seems right for you.