Advice for business email security Choosing a good secure password
Keeping your email access secure is vital but creating a reasonable password is not difficult. Learn the trade offs in this guide.
You've probably encountered advice online telling you to use a made up mix of letters, numbers and special characters as your password to make it secure.
When they talk about secure they mean secure against being guessed by a hacker or other malicious people.
But if IT security is not your main profession then having to use a password like Fr$4Em_$3LoR$ will lead to you writing it down on a post-it next to your computer which you should never do.
Simple to remember but long
Instead the recommendation for a strong password is to choose 4 random words that when written one after the other create about a 20 character long password.
Feel free to use spaces, dots or dashed if you want, or use the name of your cat, dog or plant as one of the words. Just make your password is 20 characters long in the end.
For example (but please don't choose these, just look around you and find four things that are often around you and put them in alphabetical order):
- cappuccino diary fred labrador
- blanket-iphone-steven-tea
- alexchristophergnomeporch
- donut.junior.school.railway
And remember. Don't write it down. If you need to remember more than one password a password manager will help you.
