• 12 or more characters


• Lowercase


• Uppercase


• Numbers


• Symbols

If the answer was no for most of the above you need to  dramatically improve the strength of your passwords, thus making it much harder to be guessed or hacked.

Luckily there is free software to make this easier on you, such as LastPass.com and PassPack.com among many others.

These allow you to securely store your passwords, and you only need a single master password to decrypt and access your information. Make sure it is a good one though or you will defeat the purpose.

Once you have software like LastPass in place you can start using very secure passwords for all of your accounts.

How do you remember quality passwords:

Step 1: color: yellow

Step 2: symbol: *

Step 3: noun: horse

Step  4: number: 138

Step 5: capitalize one letter: H

Final Password: yellow*Horse138

By doing the password this way you will find you can actually remember it and it is very secure.

How often do you change passwords?

It is highly recommended that you change passwords of importance, atleast once every 3 months,  consider making it even more frequently if the data related to the account is of any value to anyone.

Own a website? Ask your server admin when the last time your key server passwords were changed? You may be surprised. You really should make a list of important passwords to change and set an email reminder to change them every few months.  Quickbooks, Email, Bank, Server, Paypal, Credit Cards..you get the idea.

Most people do not start thinking about password security until it is too late. Nothing shuts down business like your company bank account or server being compromised. So act now and save yourself the trouble.

Bonus Tip:

The best password in the world is no good if the security questions (for password recovery) is way too easy. In what city were you born? Anyone can find that out! Make sure to write a custom security question whenever possible or at least pick the one hardest to guess.

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