We’ve all received emails and seen Facebook posts that came from a friend’s account, but were obviously sent by spammers. Password hijacking and identity theft are among the most common crimes these days
Criminals use several dirty tricks to steal your identity, and one of their favorites is to decipher passwords. Then they can log in as you, send spam, and steal your personal information.
Consumer Reports recently posted three ideas on developing secure passwords. We thought we’d pass them on to help you create hacker-proof passwords at PeopleFinders.com (or anywhere else).
Acronym Password
Using an acronym enables you to create a long password that’s easy to remember, but difficult for hackers to decode. Start by making a sentence that is meaningful to you, and then take the first letter from each word. When appropriate, capitalize some letters and substitute numbers for others.
For example, we might make the sentence: PeopleFinders is home to the People Search experts. If we take the appropriate letters, our password starts off as PFihttPSe. Then we could change the letter “I” to the number “1” and the letter “e” to the number “3” and end up with PF1httPS3. That gives us a strong password … but now that we posted it here we won’t actually use it.
Perfect Your PeopleFinders Pass Phrase
A pass phrase is a mixture of words, numbers and punctuation symbols. You can use this method to create passwords with complete words and enhance them with other characters. For example, you could create something like ethyl7!dog5bounce^.
Stay away from words that could be easily associated with you. If you’re a well-known birdwatcher, then bird-watcher1 would not be an ideal password.
Password In A Haystack
The final tip for creating secure passwords borrows from the idea that it is impossible to find a needle in a haystack. Your goal here is to simply expand your password. After all, a larger haystack makes better cover for a needle.
Build a password in a haystack by inserting characters or numbers into the middle of a word, like p(e(o(p(l(e1s)e)a)r)c)h). The longer and more varied your characters are, the better your password strength will be.
Remembering Your PeopleFinders Password
Building an impenetrable password won’t do much good if you can’t remember it. Try to come up with something that you can recall easily, but others won’t be able to figure out. Keep these concepts in mind when you’re creating passwords for any account. They will help you stop spammers from using your name to send junk mail, and prevent criminals from stealing your identity.
If you do forget your PeopleFinders password, we are always happy to help. Send us a password request, and we’ll send your password to the email address you used to create your account.
If Your Password Is Hacked
Criminals can be very sophisticated. Despite your best efforts, there is no 100% guarantee that someone won’t hack into your account. If at some point you believe your PeopleFinders account was used without permission, we can help. Contact the PeopleFinders Customer Care team and give them all the information you can. We’ll work with you to resolve the problem quickly.
Do you have any other tips on creating secure passwords? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts, and thank you for reading the PeopleFinders people search blog.
Tags: How To Create A Secure Password, Identity Theft, Login, Password, People Search, PeopleFinders, Secure Login, Secure Password
guess that means I cant use 1234 anymore! good tips, i need to update some of my paswords.