You might be accustomed to using emoji in your everyday life to react to a message, sign off a WhatsApp or liven up a social media post.
But did you know that the humble emoji can also play an important role in keeping your passwords secure?
It turns out you can use emojis when creating a strong password for apps and online accounts – and if you’re looking for something which will be impossible to guess adding emojis can give you that extra layer of safety.
Experts have pointed out that computers treat emojis as they might numbers and special characters such as punctuation marks in a password.
They are also easier to remember than a random collection of characters and numbers – and are less likely to be used by hackers trying to guess your password.
‘When intruders try to brute-force a password containing letters, numbers and punctuation marks, there are fewer than a hundred variations for each symbol they need to pick,’ Stan Kaminsky, an expert at cybersecurity firm Kapersky told The Sun.
He explained: ‘There are more than 3,600 standardized emojis in Unicode, so adding one to your password forces hackers to go through around 3,700 variants per symbol.
‘In terms of complexity, a password made up of five different emoticons is equivalent to a regular password of nine characters, while seven emojis is equivalent to a strong password of 13 ‘regular’ characters.’
However, it’s worth noting that not every app will allow you to use emoji.
So before you get frustrated and unleash your inner angry emoji face, check whether the app or website you’re creating a password for will let you get away with it.
You should also be aware that using too many emojis in your password could slow you down if you’re trying to log into something quickly – and using the same ones repeatedly could equally be a giveaway to your password details for a certain app or website.
So if you are planning to throw a few smileys into your next lot of login details, choose carefully.
‘A reasonable compromise would be to add an emoji or two to your password to up its complexity,’ Kaminsky explained.
And of course if you want to make any account extra secure, consider taking other measures to boost your safety – such as two-factor authentication, or making your password as long as possible to make it harder to guess.
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