Creating a secure password for a business can be a little tricky these days. With Fortune 500 companies like Sony and healthcare giants like Anthem Blue Cross being hacked on a regular basis, how can you ensure that your information is locked down tight?

The first key to creating a great password is the length.

The longer the better. The easiest password to break is actually one that is only 4 digits. Use a phrase or a long word to create the base of your password.

Second, incorporate numbers, capitals, and special characters.

These will break up the password and make it a little harder to hack into. Since you’re going outside of the alphabet this increases the time it takes to break the password and increases the difficulty in regards to cracking it.

A great pointer for this is to substitute numbers for letters. Like a number 3 for the letter e or the @ sign for the letter a. These little tricks help you to remember the password since it’ll be a word or phrase, but will make it more secure. By using all of these types of characters and numbers to create your password, you’ll expand your possibility pool –making it harder to crack.

Another way to have a secure password is to use a password generator.

There are a few services that offer them, including Google, which will generate a secure password. The downside to this is that the passwords are often hard to type and are even harder to memorize. Also you’ll need to have to find a way to save them in order to not mistype them, which could put you at risk.

Passwords you should never use:

Things that appear on the keyboard. Yes, a row of keys although easy to remember are very common passwords and are even easier to break. If your password is something like “qwerty” or “1qaz” you should probably change it. Also, stay away from using PASSWORD.

If you stick with something complex and long that incorporates numbers and special characters, you’ll be in good shape to ensure your password is secure.

At RenovoData, we care about our customers, especially keeping their data safe and protected.

We work tirelessly to ensure that crucial business data is backed up and recoverable in the event of a disaster or data loss event. We stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the latest developments and trends in cloud computing. Still, in this day and age it does come as a bit of a surprise that some people are using weak passwords like “password” or “123456”! Most people know that the more common or weak a password, the higher the chances someone could hack into personal accounts… and yet, these weak passwords continue to be used A LOT.

Recently SplashData released its annual list of the year’s worst passwords. Among the top-ranked terrible passwords were: “qwerty”, “baseball”, and “football”. Numerical sequences also dominated the list including “111111” and “123123”. Changing things up are “abc123” and (somewhat ironically) “trustno1”.

In order to help you make your passwords more secure, we’ve gathered a few tips and suggestions:

• Don’t use the same password for all of your accounts.
• Don’t skimp on the character count. Unless otherwise directed, passwords should be at least 14 characters long.
• Avoid words with personal information, for example, your name, your pet’s name, your child’s name, the name of your favorite sports team, etc. This kind of information can be relatively easy to find and in turn, guessed.
• Scatter numbers and symbols throughout your password. Having them at the end or replacing an E with a 3 is just not secure enough.
• Pick random word combinations (like cheese-shoe-rain).
• Pick the first letter of each word in a sentence from a poem or song. (For example, “Let it go, let it go, Can’t hold it back anymore” would translate to “l-i-g-l-i-g-c-h-i-b-a”)
• Use a random password generator. (Example: http://passwordsgenerator.net/)
• We hope this post will get you thinking about the security of your passwords. Forgetting a password is a pain, but dealing with the aftermath of unauthorized access is much worse. Protect yourself!