How to choose strong passwords

Passwords are the first line of defense against cyber criminals. It’s important to pick strong passwords that are different for each of your important accounts and to change them regularly. Here are some ideas to help create strong passwords.

Use a unique password for all your important accounts.
Use unique passwords for your accounts, especially important accounts like email and online banking. You are likely to have dozens of accounts across the web, and you cannot guarantee the security of all of them. Criminals target sites that lack strong security, in order to harvest usernames and passwords that they test against other popular sites. When you use the same password across the web, a cyber criminal can learn the password from a less secure site and then use that password to compromise your important accounts.

Use a long password
The longer your password is, the harder it is to guess. There are almost one quintillion possible 10-character passwords (that’s 4,000 times as many possibilities as if your password only has eight characters) … and that’s if you only use numbers and letters.

Use a password with a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols
Using numbers, symbols and mixed-case letters in your password increases the difficulty of guessing or cracking your password. For example, there are more than 6 quadrillion possible variations for an eight-character password with numbers, symbols, and mixed-case letters – 30,000 times more variations than an eight-character password with only lowercase letters.
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