What makes a password more secure?

Having a strong password is an important part of protecting your account and tax information from unauthorized access. A strong password could have:

• 8 or more characters (required)
• Lower-case letters: abcd...
• Upper-case letters: ABCD...
• Numbers: 1234...
• Symbols: !@#$%^&*...

Essential elements of password security:

• Don't tell anyone your password.
• Make your password easy for you to remember but hard for someone else to guess.
• If you think there's even a chance someone else might know your password, change it.
• Use a different password for each account.

There are plenty of ways to come up with passwords that meet the suggestions above. One option is to use a password generator. Another option is to choose three short words and paste them together with punctuation and numbers between them.

For example:

Dog;ran2sit
1Book+Mug=Sleep
5kids.goaT!fish