Keeping Passwords Secure
Step 1 - Review Your Current Password(s)
Test your current password strength first. If it takes less than a few days to crack you have an urgent problem. You can take some small comfort from the fact that most passwords in use today actually take seconds to crack.
Ideally, you will want your password to be 16 characters long and a random collection of lower and upper case, together with numbers and special characters. If you test one of these it should be around 4 trillion years to crack. That may sound way over the top but don't forget computers are always getting faster. So what may be super secure today may only be just good enough in a few years.
So on the basis that your password is not strong enough let's proceed to step 2.
Step 2 - Create a Good Strong Password
Use our password generator tool to create a strong password. The default options of 16 characters, lower case, upper case, numbers, and special characters are going to give the best results. We've helped out a little by disregarding some of the more uncommon special characters and also similar characters like "i" and "1" or "o" and "0".
Ideally, you will want to use a password such as this for every site you need to login to. However, every site should have a different one. This is because if one site were to get hacked you wouldn't want to have to change the password for everything else.
I'm sure you've spotted the problem here. How and earth are you going to remember all of these passwords? You could copy them to a text file but then if someone got hold of this it's game over. It's also going to be a pain to copy and paste from this file every time you need to login.
There's a better way and that is to use a password manager, so let's proceed to step 3.
Step 3 - Take the Stress Out of Passwords and Use a Password Manager
A good password manager will integrate with your browser and smartphone and auto-fill in passwords for you. In fact, you may actually never know or see the password being used. It will allow you to keep passwords organised and secure and importantly different for each site. There is then only one password to remember and that's the one for your password manager.
Some will allow you to run a business version so that you can share passwords between staff for common logins. The ones listed below will cost money (but the trade-off for security and time saved makes this a very good investment). You can of course search for free password managers if you wish.