Your identity has more exposure while you’re online, this is where you may sometimes do shopping, pay bills or transfer money on your bank’s online banking system. These are the opportunities that identity thieves take advantage of. Complex passwords are a good obstacle, they’re tougher to crack since there’s more guessing and it takes longer.

Identity thieves use password cracking software to gain access to simple passwords like your birth date, last four of your social, your mother’s maiden name etc. These passwords are easy to guess for someone who knows a thing or two about you. Some of these programs are pretty sophisticated, having compiled millions of password combinations it’s not that hard to get access to an account that’s not properly protected with a strong password.

How to come up with complex passwords

You have to take the time to come up with a unique and strong password and not just set a password with the first thing that comes to mind. The proper way to create strong passwords is to use capital letters, numbers and whenever possible special characters and include as many characters as you can remember. Using combinations of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters will increase the security of your accounts and keep the thieves guessing some place else.

If you’re not used to creating strong passwords because of the habit of simply using your last name or “11111″ or “12345″ for every account you own, the best thing to do is to think of something you like or something that you know not many people are aware of. Let’s take for example the phrase Id Lock Network, you could come up with many combinations of this phrase as a password if you include special characters, numbers and capital letters in the phrase, like this:

!dL0ckNetw0rk – notice here that there are zeros replacing the “o” and the exclamation point replacing the letter I, we also have capital letters in this password. However, there are other even safer variations that we can come up with and even extend the password a few more characters to make it even safer, here are some more examples:

• !dL0CKnetw0rk!
• !dL0ckNetw0rk4ever
• !dL0ckNetw0rk$!
• !dL0ckN@tw0rk$!

You get the idea! Some online interfaces will not allow special characters, so this is when you have to get even more creative and use capital letters and numbers in combinations that still qualify your phrase as a strong password, like so:

• IDL0ckNetw0rk2000
• 1DL0ckNetw0rk1000
• 1DL0cknetw0ks2008

Creating strong passwords should become a matter of habit and it is an important step in protecting your identity from online identity thieves. It gets easier the more you practice it. You don’t need to remember several different passwords, but have at least 3 different combinations of the same passwords with one or two extra characters and numbers and special characters in different orders.