Locked out of your email again? Frustrating isn’t it? What you need is a password that’s not only easy to remember but just as importantly is hard to crack. This, incidentally, rules out the world famous – or should that be notorious -  ‘password’. It tops a list of the most commonly used passwords that you will probably not be surprised to learn includes number 1-6, letters a-f, letmein and password1 and, if they were not simple enough to crack in the first place, they are also all online for hackers to see.

And it’s not just your personal email accounts you need to pay attention to, but any business ones as well, whether you are a solicitor,  a carpet cleaner or a firm of locksmiths, it’s essential to keep your business free from hackers.

To come up with a password which will have the hackers confounded, opt for six or more jumbled characters based on a meaningful sentence or line of poetry, ideally with a mix of upper and lowercase letters and numbers, as well as something like a punctuation mark, just to round things off. Pick a phrase like ‘I want to go to America”, and use the first letter of every word except for ‘to’ which becomes ‘2’. You will then up with ‘Iw2g2A’ which won’t make sense to anyone else, but has the advantage of being easy enough to remember.

Obviously you should use different passwords for different sites 0- that really should go without saying. But do not worry that you will have to remember a plethora of different passwords. Once you’ve chosen your master password, you can customise it for different websites. Add the first and last letters of the company name at each end (so, for instance, when logging onto Amazon, it would be Aiw2g2An) and even if it’s hacked, your other accounts will stay secure.

Image “Lens Password” by Salvatore Vuono, courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net