Password protecting Your LinkedIn Account

Other passwords to avoid are those personal ones e.g. your children’s names, dates of birth etc. It’s going back a few years, but in the movies War Games and Clear and Present Danger had characters that had accounts hacked because the targets of the hackers used personal information as their password.  A little bit of research was all it took to break into the accounts!So now that you know what passwords to avoid, lets look at what makes a strong password. They should:

• 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