How to choose a proper password to defend your money?

A significant number of computer break-ins are a result of a poorly chosen password. Do you want to protect your e-mail or online bank account from security breaches? Think twice before choosing a password. 

Trying to access your sensitive financial information, financially-motivated hackers use password guessing, social engineering and dictionary attacks. If your password shows no imagination or distinctiveness, it will become an easy prey.

According to statistics, many people choose weak passwords that even a teen might figure out. It is often a variation of your home address, phone number, date of birth, names of family members, friends or pets. Some users rely on the easiest keyboard combinations to remember such as "1234," "12345678," or "QWERTY". 

Poorly chosen passwords may lead to identity theft. You need to include upper- and lower-case letters, numerals, punctuation marks and other keyboard symbols like #, &, and $ to protect your information. 

Choosing good PINs and passwords

The password you choose can make it easy or hard for fraudsters to gain access to your bank or e-mail account. If you don't want someone to read your e-mails or withdraw your money, then read how to create a strong and secure password:

•    Choose a password that is longer than seven or eight characters. Computers can process a large amount of data for a very short period of time. It is estimated that a 5-character password might take 10 seconds to guess, 6-character - 1,000 seconds, 7-character - 1 day, 8-character - 115 days, 9-character - 31 years, 10 characters - 3,000 years.

•    Adding a number or punctuation mark to a word can make a password a bit more secure. However, if it is a word from a dictionary then it is still easy to figure out. It is better to insert numbers, punctuation marks, or special characters at random in the middle of a word. So instead of badcat1 use ba1dca1t. 

•    Keep in mind that changing "$" for "S", 0 (zero) for an o, and a "1" for "I" or "L" don’t work anymore. This method is very well known. 

•    Use fragments of words mixed in unusual ways that the hackers won’t find in a dictionary, or take a compound word and change the pieces in an unusual way. For example, you can use fly151butter instead of butterfly. 

•    Interleave two words, or a word and a number. For example, mixing “winter” and "summer" gives "wsiunmtmer". It is better to use words that are not related to each other, like shoes and seven. 

•    Another way to create a strong password is to take the first letters of a quote, phrase, poem or song lyric you can easily remember. For example, you can take “Hey, hey, you, you, I could be your girlfriend,” pick the first letter of every word and create a password HHYYICBYG. It will be difficult to guess.

•    Don’t solve the code-memorizing problem by using the same password for all your accounts, since identity thieves might use programs to check hundreds of financial websites to figure out where else your code works.

•    Whatever method you choose, it's a good idea to change your password from time to time. If you have a number in your complex password, you can just change it every month. For example, if you use puter71comPC, you can change it to puter72comPC and so on. It is easy to remember.