Choosing a strong password provides a basic level of security for your account. It is the first and most important step that you should take in order to secure any of your accounts. Below we provide a list of methods with which you can make your password really hard to hack through.

Here are some of the best methods for creating a strong password:

• Choose a password that is at least eight characters long, but preferably longer. The longer the password, the harder it is for brute-force attacks to hack it.
• Use a mixture of lowercase and uppercase characters, numbers, and special symbols.
• Place a special symbol in the middle of a word (for example, vege%tarian).
• Use some unusual way of contracting a word. You don't have to use an apostrophe.
• Think of an uncommon phrase, and then take the first, second, or last letter of each word. You can't always get what you want, and your password could become ycagwyw. Throw in a capital letter, a punctuation mark, and a number or two, and you might have yCag5wyw.
• You can deliberately misspell one or more words to make the password harder to crack.
• Combine several of the above techniques.
• Use something that no one but you would ever think of. The best password is one that is totally random to everyone else but you. Since this is highly dependent on the individual, it is difficult to tell you how to come up with these, but use your imagination!

How to not choose a strong password

There are also a few techniques that you shouldn’t be using while creating your password. Those are the techniques that will make your password really weak and easy to guess. Below we provide a number of those “methods” which you definitely must avoid in creating a password!

You should avoid these techniques when you create a password:

• Using words in a dictionary.
• Using your username or real name.
• Using anyone else's name.
• Using any word in a cracking dictionary. A cracking dictionary contains lists of words that attackers use to try to crack passwords (this is also known as a dictionary attack). These lists include abbreviations, cartoons, character patterns, machine names, famous names, female names, male names, Bible citations, movies, myths, numeric patterns, short phrases, places, science fiction, Shakespeare, songs, surnames, and just about anything else you can think of.
• Using any of the above techniques with a single character before or after it (for example, happy1).
• Using any of the above techniques with capitalization (for example, Cat or Walrus).
• Using any of the above reversed (for example, reversing cat to tac), doubled (cat to catcat), or mirrored (cat to cattac).
• Selecting a word and substituting some characters (for example, changing password into p@ssw0rd, or supersecret into sup3rs3cr3t). Attackers are well aware of these substitutions and can crack them.
• Using keyboard patterns (for example, qwerty or nbvcx). Cracking programs look for these types of patterns in passwords.

Safeguarding your password

There are a couple of “rules” that you want to follow in order to safeguard your password. First of all, never tell your password to anyone else. Second of all, don’t write your password down, whether it’s on a piece of paper or in your gadget. Even if you create the strongest password in the world, there will be no use for it if you write it down and someone sees it. It also will be useless if you tell someone your password, as they may tell somebody else and so on.

And of course, in case you receive an e-mail or a message from someone who claims to be an administrator, a security specialist, or some other important-sounding position who asks you to change your password, don't do it. This is a popular scam to trick the unsuspecting.