A passphrase can protect your accounts

Passwords or passphrases are your first line of defense against people who want to steal your money, your identity, your social media accounts and anything else they can get their digital hands on. Make your passwords and passphrases long and strong to protect your accounts and private information.

A passphrase is a phrase or sentence that is meaningful to you, but not to the bad guys. Passphrases are stronger than passwords because the tools hackers use to crack your passwords begin to lose effectiveness after 10 characters. A passphrase of 40 characters or more is a daunting challenge to hack.

Don’t use book titles, song lyrics or other publicly available information. Instead, use something very personal to you.

You can make your passphrases even stronger by adding numbers, spaces and special characters. Look for opportunities to substitute letters of the alphabet with characters or numbers. For instance, an “a” can be represented by the @ symbol.

The strongest passwords are randomly created by software called a password generator, but randomly created passwords can be difficult to remember. To help, you can manage all your passwords using a password manager. Some password managers include a password generator for the best of both worlds.

The most commonly used passwords are based on family names, hobbies or simple patterns. Avoid these kinds of passwords if you want to make your accounts as secure as possible.

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