Personal Injury Lawyer Blog | Campisi LLP

Is your password safe? You may be more vulnerable than you think.

Written by Campisi Law | Mar 20, 2020 4:11:20 AM

Now that Christmas is over, you might be ready to seek out some holiday deals.

When you are shopping online, make sure you are protecting yourself and your money with a strong password.  Did you know that hackers have developed software that can try tens of millions of possible password combinations per second? This software can guess a five-character password in under three hours. If you only use lowercase letters, it’s 11.9 seconds.

A good password should be at least nine characters long, or even longer, have a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols, and be hard to guess.  Don’t use your pets names, company name, birthday or address.  You will be making it too easy.

We recently heard of a great trick to come up with a great, yet easy to remember, password: take a memorable sentence and base your password on the first letter of each word.

For example:  "When I was seven my grandmother took me to Florida".  Your password could then be, "wIw7mGtm2F" (10 characters long, has lower case, numbers, and uppercase characters, and is easy to remember).

Happy Shopping!