Doing business online inevitably involves creating, memorising and recalling passwords. Understand how to create a strong password to minimise the chance of your security being compromised.

First, make sure you do not use the same password for two different applications of varying importance (for example, your password for a discussion forum and your password for internet banking.)

Next, if you choose to store your passwords in a “safe place”, make sure the security you apply to that safe place is at least as strong as the most important password kept there. For example, if you use a piece of software or a spreadsheet to keep track of passwords, don’t use a weak or easy-to-guess password to access that list.

For the password itself, avoid:

• Names, numbers and dates associated with you, your family or your business
• Dictionary words
• Sequences of letters or numbers

Passwords take longer to crack if they:

• Contain a mixture of lowercase and uppercase letters
• Contain numbers
• Contain symbols or special characters
• Are longer than 6 characters

You can make passwords easier to remember by having a password that is pronouncable, i.e. it follows English word conventions, without actually being a real word. For example, “4toblestic”.

A common mistake made by many small business website owners is to have an order form or booking form that accepts credit card details, securing it by having an SSL certificate, but then having the form email the results to the website operator.

Unless you are using encrypted email, you have defeated the purpose of using a secure web page, because the email that contains the credit card details is far less secure than even an unencrypted web page. Security is only as secure as the weakest link!

If you need to process the credit cards yourself, the most cost-effective solution is to store an encrypted version of the credit card details in a database, and have an interface for the website operator to login and view those details, again with an SSL certificate securing that page. A procedure to delete credit card details once processed is important with this solution.