PASSWORDS: THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE

Choosing a unique, hard-to-guess password will likely stop all but the most determined hackers. To foil most hackers, just sprinkle some random characters (such as symbols and numbers) in your passwords, or use a special password-generating program such as Quicky Password Generator (http://www.quickysoftware.com), Masking Password Generator (http://www.accusolve.biz), and Randpass (http://www.randpass.com), which can create truly random passwords of varying lengths.

Unfortunately, the more people who use a computer, the more likely one of those users will choose an easy-to-guess password. All it takes is one password to allow a hacker to break into a computer. If you thought keeping hackers out of a computer was tedious and difficult, finding a hacker on your computer and kicking him out is a lot more work.