With so many of us now using the internet for all number of things including banking, or storage of confidential data a number of our clients have asked our advice on how to choose a secure as possible password. We decided to do this tutorial slightly different as it doesn’t give a step by step guide but will give points that we feel should be considered when you are selecting a strategy for passwords after all it is going to be your personal password .

First thing we ask them is “What is your current password?” and guess what, yes you guessed it almost every single one of them straight away tell our engineer their password. Luckily we are honest people and wouldn’t log onto the nearest computer and empty their bank accounts or take the companies confidential data but that person has just learned a very valuable lesson in password security. Therefore no matter how good or secure a password you choose IF YOU TELL SOMEONE IT IS NO LONGER SECURE, this is called social engineering, which is a common technique used by the bad guys to find passwords. Research has shown that most employees share there passwords 8-10 times a year can you be sure that the people gaining these passwords wont look at things they shouldn’t see.

Does your password fall into any of these categories something relating to friends, family, memorable dates, pastime, or pets? According to a survey by credit card firm Visa Europe, well over three quarters of surfers choose passwords relating to friends, family and memorable dates. Therefore anyone who knows a little about you should be able to guess your password without much difficuty. Try this out on your partner/best friend/etc ask them to have a few guesses of what they think your password would be (remember not to tell them if they chose correctly or not). If they guess exactly or relatively closely you know it wouldn’t take much for them or even worse people you don’t trust to guess the correct password.

Have you changed the default password?? Many applications come with default passwords eg Admin, Password, or even worse blank passwords as default. It is estrimated that the word 'password' itself still accounts for two per cent of the UK’s most common password choice. Armed with this info wouldn’t you try the obvious first if trying to guess a password , so don’t make it easy for anyone to guess your.

How long is your password?? A two letter password, for example, has only 676 possible combinations. A password with eight letters offers more safety with 208,000,000 combinations.

Now you have realised that longer passwords are more secure but unfortunately that not the end of the story.

Does your password contain a mixture of letters, numbers and characters?? With the power of modern computers lots of crackers simply use the brute-force method of finding out your password therefore any words contained in a dictionary and or common password lists are quickly and easily checked using a computer application which are easily downloaded from the internet.

By now you should have noticed a common theme and decided that a long password which contains letters,numbers and characters is a good option for choosing a password but random character passwords like “d5gs45><hEG;~g5343~@12R” although the best they are not easy to remember so why not select something that easier for you to remember along lines of “1@eeZi0Ne#2#P1ck:-)”. Please don’t use the example password as it would be pretty easy to guess using the methods I have described as it uses very common password words and is mererly showing how you should mix everything up with letters in lower and higher case, characters, numbers, nice typos, and long in length but still meaningful and easy for you to remember.

After selecting passwords there is still a few other things to remember change them regularly and have different passwords for different things. After all you don’t want someone if the manage to somehow guess your password having access to your account forever and you don’t want them having guessed the password to have access to every account on every service you have with one single password.

Our final note no mater how secure if someone is determined enough they will eventually guess a password using brute force whether that being in seconds, hours, days, months or years is purely down to how effective you make your password but why make life easy for them after all very few going to spend time trying to crack your as secure as possible password when there is easier pickings elsewhere.