The password that we key into our email, instant messenger’s, bank websites and online accounts are often the only thing protecting our (for the most part) very personal and private data whether it is as simple as our address, or as potentially dangerous as our credit cards, tax file numbers and so on. So it is very important that we make this line of defence as hard for a hacker to crack as possible.

In this post I will have a look at a few simple things that you can do to really strengthen your passwords. A lot of the hints and tips that are put out there involve you creating passwords that are so hard to remember you just don’t worry about creating stronger passwords anymore. Now the first thing that I will state and it is pretty common knowledge, that your password shouldn’t ever be a dictionary word! In fact don’t even let it be a string of letters – these passwords that contain only letters are very easy to break.

My next tip here is something very simple but incredibly effective, something that I have put into all of my passwords and I find it an easy way to remember a rather ‘complex’ password. My thought here is to take something that you can easily remember, it may even be your current (dictionary word) password. For the purpose of this exercise lets use the word password as our password.

You can make this incredibly weak password infinitely more secure by simply replacing certain characters with symbols on your keyboard that look the same as the letters in the current word. These symbols may be as simple as ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) < > ?.

After substituting some of the letters with these symbols we may have a password that looks like this: p@s$word

Now because we have broken up the dictionary word (yes I know it still contains a dictionary word but will look at this next) by putting in symbols it would take a significantly bigger effort for the hacker to break this, while remaining easy for you to remember because it still looks and nearly reads the same as the actual word.

Now lets make this a little more secure! Don’t forget about the numbers on your keyboard either, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 are also good to be substituted or put into a password to make it harder to break. After substituting again we might have a password that looks like this: p@5$w0rd. Notice I replaced the first s with 5 and the o with a zero. To read and remember it is almost the same as the original but for someone to try and guess or use hacking software it is almost impossible.

Do yourself a favour and change your passwords to include some of these tips today! This will significantly improve your peace of mind while using the net and protect all of that important data that is out there.