Password Safety Tips

At myhomepage, security is our number 1 priority. Using our password vault means you can safely store your username and password details for websites with us and they'll always be completely safe (you can even make up a random password of numbers, lower case and upper case characters and you'll always be able to find it). However, we also acknowledge that passwords should be safe in the first place and good password practice is half the battle for online saftey.

So, below you'll find a short list of really good password tips.

1. Never use a common word or even an uncommon word. Words you can find in a dictionary are a big no no. Similarly, never use a consecutive string of numbers (or letters for that matter). Notable culprits are '123456', 'abcdef' and 'password'.

2. Be at least 8 characters long (the longer the better).

3. Use a random selection of characters: upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation marks. Having at least 1 of each is a great idea, having 2 of each is even better! Some websites and services might not allow punctuation in a password so you might not be able to have some punctuation in there but you should aim for a random selection of numbers and upper and lower cased characters.

4. One great tip that I've found is replacing some standard characters with numbers of punctuation marks. For example: A = 4, S = $, E = £ and so on. Another tip which I think works quite well is to have the first letter upper case. Taking these tips on board, the notoriously unsafe: 'password' can be made a bit more safe by changing it to P4£5w0rD.

5. Another tip is to not have recurring letters, even if they are not sequential.

6. A tip that works well for me is to use foreign words that aren't in the English dictionary. For example, you could try using Korean words instead, add some upper casing, some numbers and some punctuation and you've got a password that will be a lot tougher to crack than 'password'. i.e. 'Y£0nG12' vs. '123456' - which one is statistically harder to crack? The first one of course!

Check out this nifty website to check your password's strength: Password Meter. They ranked the first one as being 72% strong; add a simple + (so it becomes 'Y£0nG12+' and it rises to 98%). Compare this to '123456' which only has a strength of 4%.

Although we're super secure at myhomepage and use the highest encryption levels, it's still always good for peace of mind to use strong passwords for all your online accounts. Hope this helped!

P.S.

The Korean word I used, 'yeong', is the number zero.