1. No reference to your life. Highly secure passwords have no reference to a person's life that could be readily found online or through friends.
2. Longer is better. They should always be at least 8 characters long
3. Combine characters. They should contain a combination of letters, numbers and special characters, like a question mark, period, @ or #.
4. Change them on a regular basis. You can setup your Windows Live ID password to expire every 72 days, and it will automatically remind you to enter a new password. You can go to https://account.live.com and login to select these settings. You can read instructions on how to do this here. Making the above tips work for you:
1.I want to use my pet's name – You can do that, but not exactly as the name is, because your pet's name is easily guessable and could be under 8 characters. A couple of examples can show you ways to do this:
a. A friend’s cat’s name is Bella. Bella loves tuna more than anything. A simple to remember password option could be: Bella#Tuna
b. A friend’s beloved horse’s name is Sand dollar. Combing letters and numbers results in a password option of: Sand D011ar (where the “o” is a zero and the “l”s are ones)
c. My dog’s name is Lady Dog. Using a more advanced option with something called Leetspeak (L33tspeak), a way of using special characters to form letters and words, I can create her name to be: |_aDy |)oG. (Notice in the word L33t that "3" replaces "E", which are close mirror images of each other.)
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