Teach Your Tweens and Teens to Create Strong Passwords for their Social Networking Accounts

Posted by on Dec 5, 2013 in Blog | 0 comments

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Online passwords are key to online safety.

Is Your Tween or Teen Using Strong Passwords on their Online Accounts?

Two Million passwords to Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo accounts were recently stolen.  The most common password was revealed to be “123456”.  Really??

Having an easy-to-figure-out-password puts individuals at risk for having their personal information compromised and could lead to identity theft. 

In this digital age, it’s important to take security and privacy seriously in order to protect personal information on all of your accounts.  This means having strong and different passwords on each account and putting your personal passwords in a safe location that only you can access.

Talk to your tweens and teens about how important it is to have a strong password for each account that they use and to protect their passwords.

What is a strong password? 

It simply means creating a password with a variety of characters, numbers, upper case and lower case text. You can help ensure that you have a strong password by using the following tips.

The Ideal Strong Password:

  • includes upper-case letters;  such as B, H, G

  • includes lower-case letters;  such as l, p, q

  • includes numbers; 1, 3 9

  • includes characters/symbols, such as #  $ % &

  • a strong password is a new password, not one previously used;

 

Password Don’ts

  • don’t use your name;

  • don’t use your user name;

  • don’t use a relative’s name;

  • don’t use your pet’s name;

  • don’t use commonly known info about you or likes/dislikes such as – Chocolate, Boston-RedSox, Patriots, Bruins (All my personal faves!)

  • don’t use your address;

  • don’t use an obvious run of numbers or letters, such as ABCD, or 123456

  • don’t use an obvious pattern of letters or number sequences, such as ACEGI or 13579

Having a strong password is a relatively simple measure that you can teach your kids to stay a little safer online!

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