As we all become more and more reliant on technology, it’s never been more important to keep yourself and your data safe online! This year we’ve been looking at HomeSwapper and how we can make it as secure as possible for you – which has included changes around how passwords work on your account. Today, we’re sharing some ideas for how to create – and importantly – remember strong passwords for your online accounts!
Did You Know?
An 8 character password takes less than 8 hours to crack (generally minutes is all it takes) but a complex 12 character password takes 77,000 years to work out – 4 little characters can make all the difference!
What changed on HomeSwapper?
A few months ago, we upped security so that all swappers would need to:
- Create passwords with a minimum of 12 characters
- Create passwords with at least 1 character from 3 out of 4 categories (lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, special characters) – these are ‘complex’ passwords
- Create a new password every 90 days
To help you create this new style of password, we added some extra pointers, so that green ticks would show against each category as you created your new password:
Using ‘passphrases’
When you think of complex 12 character passwords, is this what you see: $Hj&*12$fgV0 ? Remembering these weird and wonderful combinations might work for some but for the majority of us, they’re impossible to get right each time.
Don’t worry though! There’s a trick we can share for creating easy-to-remember and very secure passwords – make your password a ‘passphrase’!
A passphrase can be a normal phrase or sentence that uses punctuation, special characters and spaces in clever ways. Have a look below at some examples of passphrases we’ve created (although don’t use these ones for your own security!):
Example 1: Bugs are r3ally gro$$
Example 2: ! L0v3 b1Scuit$!
Example 3: Th3 L10N Roars T0night!
Passphrases are easy to create, remember and type – and they become more secure when you exchange random letters for special characters (!, *,&,%, etc.). The more words in your phrase, the better.
Do any easy-to-remember phrases spring to mind for you? Get your thinking caps on and get creative to keep your online world secure!
The HomeSwapper Customer Support team are always on hand to give advice and tips on how to get the most from HomeSwapper. They deal with Swappers every day and have a unique insight and view on the thousands of successful swaps that take place on HomeSwapper.
