What's your password? And is it safe?

Ten years ago, we all had a common password for the many applications that we used.
But, unfortunately the days of having that one 6 digit password, such as your pets name or favourite football club are long gone.
​From Facebook, to Paypal, from Ebay to Netflix, pretty much all applications will now require you to have a unique password that consists of at least 8 characters containing 1x  upper case, 1 x numerical and 1 x special symbol.  Whats more,  they also inform us that, whatever you do, make sure you have a different password for each of the applications that you use. Note though that this is worth doing, in the past 18 months major sites such as Linkedin,  Yahoo and Tumbler  and Talk Talk, have all been hacked and all these sites had peoples personal information stored and taken!

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​So how do you come up with a good password that you could simply modify for each application ensuring that you do not potentially not lock yourself out via the 3 attempt rule??

You can use the generated passwords that they often provide, but that can lead to all sorts of issues when you lose that bit of paper. So here are our little tips to help you choose a password that can be remembered:

• A lot  of people are unaware of is the fact that these days a lot of different applications do allow you to have a space in in your password. So take advantage of that. 
• Don't struggle trying to come up with exactly 8 characters, try more..a 10 character password will work and is more effective
• Try using the special character at the beginning rather than an afterthought at the end
• Pick numbers that you can remember but ensure they are not sequential and your birth date. Try randomly select a number from your phone number and place that in the position in your password i.e. the third number of your phone number could go in place of your 3 character of your special word.

We also recommend that if you use Google on your PC,  take advantage of the smart lock feature (The little notification that pops up and asks you if you want Google to remember your password).  And don't worry of your PC crashes.. you can simply log back into Google with your credentials and it will remember your passwords or if you get really stuck go to passwords.google.com, where you can find out all the passwords that you have asked Google to remember. Obviously this only works well if you have secure Google login credentials....

Whatever you do, try not to use a password from the following list - These were the worst and believe it or not the most commonly used passwords of 2016
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1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. qwerty
4. 12345678
5. 111111
6. 1234567890
7. 1234567
8. password
9. 123123
10. 987654321
11. qwertyuiop
12. mynoob
13. 123321
14. 666666
15. 18atcskd2w
16. 7777777
17. 1q2w3e4r
18. 654321
19. 555555
20. 3rjs1la7qe
21. google
22. 1q2w3e4r5t
23. 123qwe
24. zxcvbnm
25. 1q2w3e