Here are some tips that I have come to use while being in the IT services business for the past fifteen years. The suggestions below may seem like a bit of a pain but this little bit of pain will also help keep your important information a little bit safer.

• For your main Email account I suggest that you have one password that you can remember easily. This password must be at least eight characters long, it must have special characters in it i.e. {}@~>< and you should throw in some capital tellers and numbers. An example may be based on the word qucikcat and give you the password qU1cKc@t465
• It is important to change this password I would suggest once a month in some small way. This will help make sure that this important password is kept safe and secure.
• For the many websites that you now need a login for I suggest that you open a free account with the company LastPass http://lastpass.com/. This is a secure cloud based service that you can save your passwords on.

You install an application on your computer on your main computer and then every time you need a new password for a website lastPass will generate it for you. When you start up your computer you log into LastPass and it then remembers all the passwords for your many different website logins. You also need a really secure password for lastpass as it will hold quite a few of your passwords.

The great thing about LastPass is that is means you have a different password for every website. So if one website gets compromised and there passwords and emails are stolen (*which seems to happen weekly to major sites these days*) you will not have to go through the process of changing the passwords on all your websites you have ever created a login for. A good example of this was when Sony lost quite a bit of user information.

• Finally I also have really strong passwords for my internet banking that I do not keep in LastPass. This is me just being over safe and cautious in case I forget to log out of lastPass on my main computer when I leave it. Though where money is concerned online I think it is a good precaution to take.

If you follow this system you will have a pretty strong lock and key on your information kingdom and you will just have to remember three or four good passwords.

If you would like to talk to someone in iPing about securing your network please contact us on +353 1 5241350 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.