February, October, who cares. “Get Safe Online Day” or “Safe Internet Day” are reminders of just how important your online security is and how it rests in your hands. Get your computer hacked and there could be painful, expensive, and sometimes crippling consequences. Passwords are not just so your Mum can’t see what you’ve been looking at. The world is CRAMMED with nasty programmes trying everything they can to trick you, mislead you, or break into your computer so they can rob you, manipulate you, ruin your business, steal your identity, you name it, they will try it. You get hacked, and you are ******.

So, remember, when you are creating passwords, although it’s a ballache, make them count. Many sites demand complexity now: like insisting on upper and lower case, and adding grammatical symbols like #,&, % etc. and including numbers, and these are good practices, but be sneeky yourself. Use random words, spelt wrong, in a string. Make a story line that you can remember. I’m not going to give you examples because that will set a guideline that couold then influence your ideas and so make it easier to crack.

But remember, an 8 character password could take days to hack, a 14 character password, hundreds of years.

Just be sneaky, and when creating passwords stop, and think carefully for a moment and create something clever that you can remember, or failing that, use a password generator to create your passwords.

Password Generators can be great but they create passwords you’ll never remember so they then require a way of saving your passwords.

Part II: Password Management