Passwords and PINs should protect your personal information and secret information. But what does it take for the password or PIN to be secure enough, and how can you reduce the likelihood of someone else guessing it?
Easy to remember and hard to guess
It is important to protect user accounts with good passwords to prevent unauthorized people from gaining access to your personal data.
But how do you know what a good password is?
A good password is easy for you to remember and difficult for others to guess.
In practice, this means that the password is unique and relatively long. At the same time, a good tip from experts is to choose a password that gives you a positive association with something from your past, perhaps something you remember or have experienced that not many people know about.
Good passwords often vary between uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.
An easy way to add special characters is to use spaces, i.e. your password is a sentence!
(Yes, using spaces in a password is fine!)
Thus, we can call the password a passphrase. When it resembles a sentence, the result is often easy for you to remember and, at the same time very difficult for others to guess.
PIN
PINs must also be difficult to guess to increase security. When choosing a PIN, whether for our mobile or SIM card, there are some simple and good tips to strengthen the code's security.
Avoid using personal dates such as birthdays, year of birth or anniversary, as this is easy to guess for others who know a little about you. Also, avoid numbers that are easy to guess or clear keyboard patterns such as 1234 or 5555.
A good tip for creating a PIN that is easy to remember but hard to guess, is to pick out a word of the same length as the PIN you will create.
If you look at the number keys on your mobile keyboard, you'll see that all the numbers have letters underneath them. Select the number buttons corresponding to the letters of the word you have chosen, then you don't have to remember a long number, only the word you have chosen.
Why are good passwords and PINs important?
As already mentioned, it is important to have good security routines related to passwords and PIN codes to avoid that they are guessed and ending up in the wrong hands. Hackers use algorithms that search through dictionaries and lists of common passwords to hack you.
In other words, if your password is in a list like this, you are much more vulnerable to computer attacks than if your password is entirely unique.
Therefore, use these simple tips when creating passwords or PINs to reduce the risk of others gaining access to your accounts and devices.