You should always aim to choose secure passwords, of course, but it is especially important to have a secure password for your email account. This is because your email account can be used to reset and control many of your other internet log-ins. It could also be used to impersonate you, to in an attempt to extract sensitive information from your contacts.

There is also the potential for serious disruption to your business; one of our clients lost access to their email for nearly a week while we worked to secure their accounts and remove hundreds of thousands of spurious emails from their inboxes. This was all due to a single individual using a weak email account password that matched the common pattern 'somename2016'.

Given the potential harm, choosing a unique and difficult-to-guess password for your email account is an essential task that you can and should do straight away.

A secure & memorable password

Please note that just adding numbers to a password does not make it secure. In fact so many people now choose passwords like 'office2018', 'George85', 'apple123' or 'arsenal1' that hackers have automated systems to try all these common password combinations.

You can get a pretty good indication of how secure a password really is by using one of the more sophisticated password checking tools. (Please note, however, many other websites that claim to check password security only use very basic rules such as testing for the presence of capital letters or numbers, which will give misleading results for unsafe passwords like 'George85'.)

The current recommendation from security experts (e.g. from the UK Government's cyber-security website) is simply to choose at least three random words.

For example "leapingaardvarktrailer" or "rootchipscastlefame"

This has several advantages:

• A password comprised of just three words (no numbers, symbols or uppercase letters) can be just as hard to 'crack' (i.e. guess) as a seven character password comprised of mixed case letters, numbers and symbols.
• The password composed of words is much easier to recall, as it can conjure a memorable mental image.

For inspiration you could pick out three random words on the front page of a news website, or perhaps from a piece of paper you have nearby.

A unique password

The password for your email account should never be used for any other log-in or website.

Hackers try to steal lists of log-ins (email addresses and passwords) from websites not because the particular website they are targeting is of interest or value to them, but because they know many of those email addresses and passwords will also be the person's log-in for more interesting/profitable systems, including the email account itself.

Changing the password for a CLUB View email account

If your club's email is hosted by CLUB View then you can change your account password via your User Control Panel.