Simple passwords do not provide a great degree of protection because they are easy to guess. Think of your bank PIN for example - you are advised against using your birth date.

Westnet require that passwords adhere to a Password Policy consisting of some basic conditions designed to make passwords stronger. In addition, there are a number of other ways to improve the strength of a password.

You can choose a much stronger password by:

• Using a mix of letters, numbers and punctuation
• Using a combination of upper-case and lower-case letters
• Using a longer password - adding 3 or 4 extra characters can make your password million of times harder to guess

We also recommend that you DO NOT:

• Use dictionary words (from any language, particularly English)
• Use your name or names of your family or pets
• Use common names, names from literature or names from popular culture (e.g. singers, artists, etc)
• Use sequences of characters that are clustered together on the keyboard (e.g. QWERTY123)

Tips to Remember Passwords

There are some things you can do to help maintain strength while making a password easier to remember. For example:

• Use two or more words that are less common
  • Put punctuation in between the words and/or individual letters
  • Deliberately misspell the words, e.g. switch letters around and substitute some letters for others
• Create a unique acronym by using the first letter from each word in a sentence (for example a quote from your favourite book, poem, movie or television show), remembering to add some punctuation and numbers too.