What is a Strong Password?

Technology is pushing for everything to be online, which means that access to all of our private information is out there for the cyber-terrorist to try to break into. This article will help you understand the importance of 'strong passwords' as a way to help protect your online information.   

Many people try to fight the movement to doing business online by simply doing things the traditional way. However, companies are making it harder to do so by doing things such as charging additional fees to speak to a person or pay your bill at their physical location.  This is because doing business online is much less expensive that paying a teller or telephone customer service representative to deal with customers.

So how can you go the extra step to protect yourself?  The answer is to use strong passwords for your online accounts.  A strong password is a password that contains a combination of numbers, letters, and even symbols.  The less traditional the password is the ‘stronger’ it is, therefore it is harder for a criminal to guess or crack.  Many people make the mistake of using common words, phrases, or things that can be easily associated to them like pets and children’s names.  However, there are many programs that criminals use that will guess things such as common phrases, words, and names to gain access to your information.  Simply adding numbers to the password (such as douglas1213 instead Douglas), or replacing letters in the name (such as h3l3n22 instead of helen22) makes the password less likely to be compromised.  

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