We’ve looked at some basic things you can do to protect your LinkedIn account, but one of the most important things that you can do is use strong passwords.
Each year a list is published of the most frequently used passwords.
This is the top 25 list for 2012:
1. password (Unchanged)
2. 123456 (Unchanged) 3. 12345678 (Unchanged) 4. abc123 (Up 1) 5. qwerty (Down 1) 6. monkey (Unchanged) 7. letmein (Up 1) 8. dragon (Up 2) 9. 111111 (Up 3) 10. baseball (Up 1) 11. iloveyou (Up 2) 12. trustno1 (Down 3) 13. 1234567 (Down 6) 14. sunshine (Up 1) |
15. master (Down 1) Source: Splashdata |
- Contain at least 8 characters, preferably more
- Not made up of words found in a dictionary.
- Not made up a just numbers.
- Be made up of both upper and lowercase characters
- Include symbols such as $&()!*@.
To create a password protecting Your LinkedIn account, think of a sentence, for example “Mary had a little lamb”.
Now make changes to the phrase so that it becomes unrecognisable. These could include:
- Removing the spaces
- Removing some or all vowels
- Replacing letters with numbers or symbols l with 1 or ), o with 0, b with 6, a with @
- Using the first letters of the phrase
For example:
- M@ryh@d@1itt1e1@m6 – change a for @, l for 1 and b for 6
- “Mha11!” – use the initials only, change l for 1 and add !”
- Mryhdl((llm6 – take out all the vowels, change t for (, and b for 6
Hopefully this has given you some ideas as to how you can create strong passwords to protect your online accounts. And using our example, if you have a system, you could still create a spreadsheet with the password hints. Just don’t call the spreadsheet passwords and make sure it is password protected. Better still, invest in a password management