How to choose a strong password

You need to know how to set a strong password for your computer and online accounts, in order to keep your personal information safe. Your email, money management and social websites are only as secure as you make them. Agent Josh Novelle will help you make your passwords as impenetrable as possible.  

How do I set a secure password?

We've all tried to sign up for a new service and been told that our suggested password isn't secure enough, at least once. You want something easy enough to remember, but not so obvious that anyone you know could take a good guess at it and access your account. Nearly all websites have various rules regarding password creation, usually they'll tell you to ensure its longer 8 characters and that it contains a few numbers that aren't in consecutive order.  

How can I choose a good password?

Sometimes taking a simple word that means something to you and changing some of the letters to punctuation/numbers can be a great idea. For example if you took my name and added special characters, it would look like this:  

@g£nt j0$h n0v£ll£

As you can see, this would be much harder to crack as a password than my name written normally.  

Another tip I often suggest to customers, is to use an existing password and add digits to the end - something nice and easy that you already remember, like a section of your home or mobile number. 

• Don't use the same password for every account and website. If someone guesses it, they could have access to your entire online life. I have seen many times how distressing this can be
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  Keep your password safe and private, be careful who you give it out to. Think of it as having equal importance to things like bank pin numbers
• Don't write your password down and leave it laying around somewhere that other people could find and use it
• Some browsers will offer to remember your passwords. I’d really recommend using a setting available on most browsers to set a master password, so that before it gives out any remembered passwords you have to enter a secure password. This gives you that next level of protection
• If you're in doubt about the strength of your password then there are checkers available such as this password security checker from Microsoft. It will rate your password against their strict rules and regulations

If you’re ever in doubt about setting a password up, give Geek Squad a call, we're always here to help via our 24/7 UK freephone number. You can also visit an Agent in one of over 100 Carphone Warehouse stores. Use our store locator tool to find your nearest Carphone Warehouse with a Geek Squad Agent in store.