Guidelines for Choosing a Secure Password

Choose a password so that you can remember what it is, but make it difficult for others to guess. A few guidelines for choosing a secure password are listed below.

• It is recommended that you do not use information about yourself that others might know for your password such as:
• personal dates
• names of family members or pets
• dictionary words (a strong password should not contain words found in the dictionary)
• phone numbers
• Try to make your password a combination of lower-case and upper-case letters, numbers, and special characters. Remember your password is caSe-sEnsiTive.
• Make your password at least eight characters in length.
• One way to construct an easy-to-remember, strong password is to take a word and replace some of the letters in the word with numbers, special characters, and upper-case letters. For example, you could replace letters in the word "surfboard" so that it becomes "$urfB0ard".