This New Year, why not resolve to ditch your dodgy old passwords?

Most of the classic New Year resolutions revolve around improving your health and lifestyle. But this year, why not consider cleaning up your passwords too?

We all know the habits to avoid, yet so many of us do them anyway: using predictable passwords, never changing them, or writing them on sticky notes on our monitor. We routinely ignore the recommendations for good passwords in the name of convenience.

Choosing short passwords containing common names or words is likely to lead to trouble. Hackers can often guess a person’s passwords simply by using a computer to work through a long list of commonly used words.