About Password Strength

The most important thing that you can do to protect your electronic identity is to establish and use strong passwords. Most people understand that they should not choose a password based on personal information such as a birthday, a child's name, or one of their common nicknames.

While these words may be easy to remember, they are also too easy for others to guess. The same basic concept holds true when you choose a password that is composed of common words or portions of words concatenated together. Passwords constructed this way may look strong to a human but can be very easily guessed by a computer program designed to execute a dictionary-based attack on your password.

Your password will be many times stronger and be able to better withstand standard attacks if you omit all words that might be found in a dictionary, mix in some upper and lower case characters, and add a few numbers to the string.