How to: Keep your iCloud password safe

In just a few basic steps, you can secure your iCloud account from the most common threats. Ben Patterson shows how

If you’re an iPhone or iPad, your iCloud password is the key to your digital realm. With your iCloud password, you can access such personal data as your iCloud mail messages, your calendar, your contacts, and your stored iCloud credit cards. Your iCloud password

could even be used to track, lock and wipe your precious devices.

Needless to say, it would be a very bad thing if your iCloud password landed in the wrong hands. But in just a few basic steps, you can secure your iCloud account from the most common threats, and you can take all those steps directly from your device.

Let’s start with the easiest – and most important – way to protect your iCloud password.

1. Change your password (and don’t use the same one twice)

Yes, I heard that groan, and I feel your pain. I just changed my own iCloud password recently (and after far too long), and it meant logging back into iCloud on a bunch of my devices, including my iMac, my iPhone, my iPad, my Apple TV, and my third-party email clients.

Not only do you need to change your password, you also need to create a ‘strong’ password – that is, a password that’s at least 12 characters long (the longer the better, actually), with a random combination of letters, numbers and symbols.

To make matters even more complicated, your iCloud password should be unique, as should be the passwords for all your other Internet accounts. (If all that sounds too difficult to keep track of, consider investing in a password manager. Trust me, they’re life savers.)

Changing your iCloud password may be annoying, but it’s the best way to foil hackers, particularly those who steal passwords from one service and use the same passwords to break into others – and indeed, that’s what Apple says happened in the recent case of