Help & Support

Here at K7 we are committed to protecting your PC, both on and offline, but there are multiple threats beyond spyware and malware that can lead to your personal information being compromised. No matter how careful you are with your own PC, chances are that somewhere, out there on the World Wide Web, there's a website with one of your accounts that's not totally secure.

One of the ways to protect yourself lies in the ability to create strong passwords. This might seem like an incredibly obvious thing, but it's simply amazing how many people out there still create account passwords along the lines of 12345, qwerty, or some other very obvious sequence of characters found on the keyboard.

There are a few things generally done which should be avoided:

1. Using the same password on multiple sites. Once hackers get into a site's database and decipher the e-mail/password combinations, they very often try those same combinations on various different sites.
2. Using one word passwords - especially words that can be found in a dictionary. Even using a different language doesn't matter - brute-force password cracking software can work through entire dictionaries in a matter of seconds.
3. Using personal information - this includes things like names, birthdates, ID numbers or other similar information
4. Using passwords spelt backwards, using common misspellings and abbreviations. Password crackers nowadays are complex enough to check for these. This includes using characters or numbers to specifically replace letters in a word - 4 for A, 1 or ! for I and so forth.

So, it looks like that password you were so proud of - d0nK3y$6 - is no longer as powerful as you may have once thought. No worries, we have a few tips you can use to create a new, even stronger password. Length and complexity are the key requirements.

Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/passwords-create.aspx) offers the following tips on creating a strong, easy-to-remember password:

1. Start with a sentence or two. 
Example: Complex passwords are safer

2. Remove the spaces between the words in the sentence. 
Example: Complexpasswordsaresafer

3. Turn words into shorthand or intentionally misspell a word.
Example: ComplekspasswordsRsafer

4. Add length with numbers. Put numbers that are meaningful to you after the sentence. 
Example: ComplekspasswordsRsafer2011

No password is ever going to be 100% uncrackable, but the example used above is going to be several orders of magnitude more secure than, for example, boBBy123.

A couple of final tips:

1. If you're anything like me, you probably have quite a bundle of accounts of a number of sites, forums and blogs - resist the temptation to use the same password more than once, if possible - and it's likely that the passwords start to pile up, making even easy to remember passwords hard to remember. It's okay to write them down, but keep them in a secure place (and no, your cellphone doesn't count as a "safe place").

2. Test the strength of your password - Microsoft has an online checker you can use at https://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/password-checker.aspx
- if you can get your strength at least up to the third bar, you're probably okay - relatively speaking.

Do you have any sudden doubts. Go now, check your passwords, make new ones, and keep your online profiles safe.