In a nutshell, your password should be at least 8 characters long and contain upper and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation.

Choosing a secure password is very, very important. If your account is compromised, a malicious user could pay out your hard-earned winnings to their own account, or award your contests’ prize money to whoever they like.

The following are our hints for picking a secure password:

• Do not use words or phrases

  Steer clear of using words that you’re likely to find in a dictionary, as a dictionary is often used as the basis of hacking attempts.

• Mix numbers, symbols and different cases

  If you limit your password to six lowercase letters, there are only 309 million possible passwords. This may sound like a lot to me or you, but a computer would be able to generate this complete list in a matter of seconds, and such lists often form an important part of password cracking programs.

  By including uppercase letters, digits, and punctuation, this number grows to almost 690 billion — that’s more than two thousand times more possibilities.

• Pick a longer password

  The longer your password, the more difficult it is to guess. There are only 309 million possible six letter passwords (if you only use lowercase letters), but if you add an extra two letters to the password, there are suddenly 208 billion possibilities.

• Make it memorable

  You still need to somehow remember your password. One way of remembering complex passwords is to come up with some kind of pneumonic — the password “Ia1o14c,MS” could be remembered as “I am 1 of 14 children, Mister Smith”.