Don’t make your passwords easy to crack

People in the UK use the Internet more and more for all sorts of transactions and financial management these days. Whilst this provides the ultimate in convenience and ease it also means that more caution needs to be exercised, as this increases the chance of someone else, such as a fraudster, getting hold of your details. This is why those that use online accounts use passwords to protect the access to their details. However, with fraudsters becoming increasingly wiley when it comes to finding ways to get around security, even passwords can easily be cracked, which means that it could take no more than a matter of minutes for some unscrupulous and determined criminal to crack your password and access your details.

Something that has increased the worry of having their codes cracked for many consumers is the number of security breaches that have been seen over recent years, where banks, government agencies and other companies have lost the personal details of thousands or millions of people, which can easily fall into the wrong hands providing criminals with the personal details and account details of all the people affected in the security breach. If you have a very obvious password such as your date of birth this is something that fraudsters will work out very quickly. Sophisticated password cracking programmes are also able to help criminals to crack codes and gain access to peoples’ accounts with ease.

Choosing the right password

When you are choosing passwords for your accounts you need to make sure that you following a few general rules to minimise the chances of your passwords being cracked with ease. This includes:

• Do not use the same passwords for all of your accounts. If you do this and someone cracks one of your passwords they will have access to all of your accounts because the same password will work on all of them
• Do not use something obvious such as your date of birth or surname. This is something that can easily be worked out, especially if someone gets their hands on your personal details due to security breaches
• Use a combination of letters and numbers and also a combination of upper and lower case. This will make it more difficult for people to crack your password
• Create a password that is personal to you and is not something that others would know (such as lyrics from a song or something else that others may have in a database)
• Do not save your passwords to your computer or smart phone. If your phone is stolen or someone else uses your computer they will be able to instantly access your accounts if you have saved all of your passwords