A British scientist invented the World Wide Web in 1989.  Twenty-nine years later and we still haven’t learned our lesson about online passwords.  Would you believe that the most commonly used passwords are things like ‘password’ and ‘123456’.  I encourage you to think about all of your online accounts and consider updating any password that you feel would be considered a weak password.

Things to remember when creating a strong password would be:

1. Make your password as long as possible.
   1. The bad guy trying to crack your password isn’t sitting in a dark room with a hoodie on. It’s a program that automatically runs through massive databases of common passwords or random combinations of characters.
   2. Remember that the longer it is, the longer it will take to crack.
2. Don’t use common phrases.
   1. Avoid names, places and dictionary words.
   2. Take a sentence, or your favorite verse, and turn it into a password. You can abbreviate the words into letters, numbers or special characters to make it easy to remember.
      1. For Example, Genesis 1:1 – In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. A good password replacement for that might be:  1tbGcth@tE.
   3. Do not use characters that are sequential in order like password123456.
3. Include capital letters, special characters and numbers.
   1. Randomly mix up symbols and numbers with letters. You can substitute a zero for the letter O or @ for the letter A.
4. Always avoid using personal information.
   1. Password cracking isn’t always done by computers. A human walking around your area could try to guess your password based on items or pictures you have lying around.
   2. Don’t include birthday, anniversary, address or SSN.
5. Try not to reuse passwords.
   1. Reusing passwords can be easier for a bad guy to get into all of your online accounts if they are able to crack one.
   2. Consider using a password manager such as LassPass or Keypass to store all of your passwords. Having to remember a different complex password for each online account can be difficult.  Password managers make it easy to store passwords and use them when you need them.  Try to stay away from writing down your passwords and keeping them in a little black book.

If you would like to change your myBBFI password and are unable to do so online, please feel free to reach out to me, Kena Mann, either by phone or email.