Dont’s
Don’t use your username as your password.
Don’t use your name, your mother’s maiden name, your children’s name or your pets name as your password.
Don’t use your date of birth or any family members date of birth as your password.
Don’t use any word you can find in a dictionary as your password.
Don’t use the same password for multiple uses.
Don’t use an alpha or numeric sequence. eg: 12345 or abcde.
Don’t give anyone your password that you would not give $100,000 and an open ended around the world airline ticket to.
Do’s
Do make your password memorable to you.
Do make your password longer than 8 characters.
Do make your password a combination of upper & lower case letters, numbers and special characters eg !@#$^&.
Do use different passwords for each account or application.
Your password needs to be secure. Don’t underestimate the tenacity of the people trying to break your password. Hackers will spend months writing scripts trying to hack your password. You really do need to make your password as secure as you possibly can.
Spend some time and come up with a password pattern that you can change for each website or application that you need a password for. Changing your password for each site or application will make your passwords a great deal more secure and much harder to hack.
Password patterns can come from anything in your life that is important to you and that you will remember. for example : “the first 4 letters of your primary schools name” + “^” + “the first 4 letters of your high schools name” + “^” + “the year you started or finished one of your schools” +”^” + “the first 4 letters of the website/app you are using the password on’. Remember to capitalise the first letter of any name and remove all the “. So an example of this finished password would be
Mill^Kent^1978^Goog
A password like this will be easy for you to remember, different for every site or app and will cover almost all of those pesky password rules that sites insist you use.