Being in the IT field I see weak password all the time. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll lump everyone into three categories.

• The first category are the people with great passwords
• The second category are people with weak password that don’t care
• The third category are people with weak passwords that think they have a great password

We live in an online world where all our data resides. Anyone can access it with your password, so it should go without saying you need a complex password.

The first category is self explanatory, but is it? With technology changing rapidly, password complexity needs to increase as well. The faster technology becomes, the faster passwords can be cracked. As of this writing, the industry standard is a password with a minimum of 12 characters, containing lowercase, uppercase, number, and a symbol. An example of this would be “gHoppop3032$”. Want to make something easier to remember, then you should consider using passphrases. A passphrase is something easy for you to remember, but hard for a password cracker to figure out. An example of a passphrase would be “Isaw12geese!”. Nowadays it should go without saying, you shouldn’t have any personal info in your passwords.

The second category of people should strongly reconsider their approach to passwords. An easy to crack password is like keeping your home unlocked 24/7. You may think that no one would ever try and compromise your accounts, but the truth is there are. Hackers are using sophisticated programs and techniques to target people by the masses. I find this one category of people the hardest to convince to change their habits.

The third category of people simply need to keep up with the times. Password complexity standards change often, and your password should reflect that.

In addition to using a secure password, consider using Multi-factor Authentication on all your accounts, as it greatly reduces the chance of you being compromised.