I have visions of my little password with a couple of free weights in its hands. While your Mac has survived against malicious attacks due to security through obscurity, that won’t always be the case. Apple is gaining in popularity and is becoming a larger part of the market share. Why does this matter? If you were a hacker or an evil doer would you waste your time if you only had a 10% shot of your hack working when you have an 80+% shot on it working on a PC? Probably not. What if those numbers start to shift and you have closer to a 45% shot either way? You might hear more and more stories of Macs being hacked or getting viruses. First step to protection is better passwords. I can’t tell you how many computers I come across that have blank passwords due to people not wanting to have to remember yet another password. You don’t have to make it hard on yourself to have a great password. Use this little trick to help your sanity and security.

Say you got a dog in 2005 and named him Snappy. Try this as a password $n@ppY2005 I’ve swapped out the S for a $ sign, the a for the @ symbol, capped the Y and added the year you got him. It’s over 8 characters has mixed punctiuation as well as numbers and symbols and easy to remember! Nice, no?

Here’s a list of numbers and symbols that you can swap for letters:

a @
B 3 (the 3 sort of looks like a capital B)
c ¢
E 3 (3 can also be used as a backwards E)
H #
I 1 (the letter i to the number 1)
L 1 (the letter L to the number 1)
o 0 (the letter o to the number 0)
s $

Feel like your password is pretty good? Take a trip over to the dark side and see how strong your password is by clicking here.

Please feel free to leave your password tips in the comments below.