Your password should be at least 8 characters long and contain uppercase 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 contest’s prize money to whoever they like.
The following are our hints for picking a secure password:
Don’t use words or phrases.
Steer clear of words that you’re likely to find in a dictionary, as dictionaries are often used as the basis of hacking attempts.
Mix numbers, symbols and different cases.
If you limit your password to 6 lowercase letters, there are only 309 million possible passwords. This may sound like a lot, 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 2,000 times more possibilities.
Pick a longer password.
The longer your password, the more difficult it is to guess. There are only 309 million possible 6-letter passwords (if you only use lowercase letters), but if you add an extra two letters to the password, you have 208 billion possibilities.
Make it memorable.
You still need to be able to 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”.