Is your password secure? If not it will need changing and below is some information to help you with your password.

Five Top Tips to Strengthening your Password Security:

1. Use challenging passwords that include a combination of letters “Upper & Lower Case”, numbers and characters “<$> % #@” and ensure the password or phrase is 8 to 12 characters long.
2. Avoid your personal information as a password eg. name, birthdate, pets or child’s name.
3. Change your password at least every 3 months for non-administrative accounts and every 45 days for admin accounts.
4. Use different passwords for each login credential.
5. If you can implement two-factor authentication, it is a must these days.

Note: Educate end users on the above tips to strengthen a password, these tips will help in preventing Hackers from accessing devices and data.

Some common ways Hackers use to identify passwords:

1. Capitalize the first letter of the password.
2. Punctuating the end of a password with a “!” or “#”.
3. Replacing letters like “o,l,e” with a “0 ,1,3”.
4. Checking all combinations of upper/lowercase of words used in a password.
5. Using numbers at the beginning or end of the password.
6. Using an “@” between two different words.
7. Inserting numbers randomly in a word.
8. Duplicating the first letter or all the letters in a word.

Note: Educate end users on the above tips and ensure that they create long complexed passwords at least 8 to 12 characters long.

Example of a complex password:  iw0rk1nW3$tv1ll3