It is essential that you choose good, secure passwords. The well-being of your board could depend on it. However, it may not be obvious to you what constitutes a secure password. These are some tips to help you choose a good password.

The password you choose should be something you can remember easily, but that others will not be able to guess. Passwords should be 7-8 characters at least - longer is preferred. They should contain lower-case and upper-case letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric symbols (!, @, #, <, ”, etc.)

A significant percentage of “hacked” boards can be traced to a poorly chosen password. Passwords are therefore among the most crucial — and most often exploited — aspects of computer security. One bad password can potentially compromise an entire system's security. If a user's password is discovered, an attacker can lurk around for months posing as that user and probing other security weaknesses at leisure, for example, deleting your board

A poorly chosen password could lead to your board being broken into. The password you choose should never be:

• a password that you have shared with someone else.

• a dictionary word from any language
• your name or the name of your spouse, child, pet, boss or anyone.
• anything that can be found out about you
• password composed of all digits or all letters;
• simple keyboard patterns like qwerty;
• any of the passwords that are used as examples on this page or anywhere else;
• passwords that are written down
• a password that you have used before.

There are several methods of choosing a good password. One good method is to use a sentence like:

I bought 3 sandwiches for lunch today, George

and turn it into a password such as:

Ib3s4l2d,G

using the first letter of each word, substituting numbers for words when possible (2d = today). This looks like a gobbledegook password — which is good, because it's hard to crack.