How to choose a good password for your work accounts

Passwords are a pain, and they’re also one of the most common ways for hackers to access and steal valuable company information. Thanks for doing your part to protect your organization by selecting a strong password for your work accounts.

To create a good password, try these tips:

1. Make it longer. It can be a lyric from a favorite song, a sentence or long title from a book, a personal slogan, or an inside joke. Instead of a password, make a passphrase.

2. Don’t use personal info. If it’s a detail that’s easy to find out about you online or from social media, don’t use it. That includes your company or department name, personal nicknames, names of kids or pets, important dates like birthdays and anniversaries, and where you live.

3. Don’t share passwords between apps. Sharing passwords increases the risks posed by a breach. To make it easier to manage a lot of unique passwords, you could use a password manager app to remember them for you. Both Chrome and Microsoft Edge offer the option to save your passwords.

4. Avoid common words and patterns. QWERTY, “password,” and simple sequences like “1234” and “abcd” are easy to guess and commonly used. Choose something unique instead.