Most of us deal with passwords each and every day, using them to protect everything from our email accounts to our online banking profiles.

When it comes to keeping hackers at bay, there’s really nothing more important than ensuring your passwords are impossible to decode. And that means knowing a little bit about what makes for a good password… and by extension, what makes for a bad one.

Good Passwords vs. Bad Passwords

Simply put, a good password is one that will prove challenging for any nefarious party to decode… so much so that they will give up trying.

The best passwords:

  • Are eight to 12 characters long.
  • Are random and difficult to predict.
  • Are different for different accounts.

By contrast, a bad password is easy to figure out, typically because it involves numbers or letters in an obvious sequence. Examples of bad passwords might include 123456789, abc123, password1, ilovejesus, etc.

Basically, if it’s something that another human (or a bot) could pretty easily intuit, it’s not a good password.

Tips for Making Better Passwords

To ensure your password hygiene is healthy and robust, keep the following tips in mind.

Put Random Words Together

One way to create strong passwords is to just string random words together. Note: These words only need to appear random to others, even if they have certain logical associations for you. For example, if you fly to a beach house at Ocean Island every July, the basis of your password might be something like PlaneOceanIslandJuly.

Use Extended Phrases

Another way to beef up your passwords is to use entire phrases. For example, say you have a pet goldfish named Goldie. Using goldie as your password is okay, but it would be much better to do something like MyPetsNameIsGoldie or GoldieLivesInABowl. These phrases are easy for you to remember but are much more challenging for hackers to guess.

Make a Custom Acronym

Still another approach is to make a custom acronym, something you can remember but hackers would not be able to figure out. An example might be 2008itykaigm, an acronym for 2008 is the year Katherine and I got married.

Switch Vowels

You can also make common phrases harder to guess by switching out tables. For example, maybe you frequently find yourself saying clean your room to a child. A good password might be cloonyourream, which takes that common phrase and simply switches out some letters.

Ensure Robust Protections for Your Digital Assets

There are plenty of steps you can take to shore up your passwords. What’s important is always making them difficult to guess; likewise, it’s recommended that you change passwords regularly, and avoid using the same password for several accounts.

Password hygiene isn’t the only factor that determines your cybersecurity, but it’s certainly one of the main ones. We’d love to tell you more about ways to keep your digital assets safe and secure. Reach out to the team at BlueArmor whenever you’re ready to talk further.