Choosing passwords is something that should not be done lightly. Choosing your child, mother or pet's name is not recommended because real words can be discovered by 'dictionary' attacks; this involves a computer program automatically trying thousands of real words to gain access to your PC.

Similarly, a password should be at least 8 characters: imagine a single character password; it would only required a short computer program to try every character until it found the right one. Two characters would take longer and so on. Current practise recommends at least eight characters but as computers become quicker and more powerful, this may need to increase.

So how do you choose a password? There are password generating programs but the drawback of these is that the resulting passwords are often difficult to memorise. We favour coming up with a memorable phrase, taking the first letter of each word and substituting some letters with numbers.

eg. 'I'll go to the foot of our stairs' becomes '1g2tfo0s'

You can further obfuscate the password by using a mix of lower and upper case letters. No doubt there are other ways to come up with effective passwords but this works for us. ie. we remember them!

Do's and Don't's

• Do memorise your password
• Don't let other people log into your computer using your password
• Do create a unique user and password for everyone using your PC
• Don't write your passwords where other people can find them