How to ensure your password is secure

We often get asked how to create a secure password.  There are many different ways, but one option is to do the following:  

1. Create a short sentence which is personal to you, which you can remember, e.g. At the weekend, I love to paddle in the sea.
2. Take the first 2 letters of each word in the sentence: Atthwe,Ilotopainthse.
3. Change at least one character to be a symbol: Atthwe,Ilotopainth$e.
4. Change at least one character to be number: Atthwe,Ilotopainth$3.

This provides a really secure password which will make perfect sense to you but appears completely random to on-lookers. Remember, if your password can ever be recovered, rather than being reset, it has not been encrypted correctly!  This is therefore a security risk as your password could be exposed to hackers if they gained access to that system. For added security, always utilise a different password for every system or website you use!