Password with upper-case can make your email account safer

LONDON, UK: Simply upper-casing your password can minimise a hacker's chance of finding out your account.

A six-letter password in lower-case text takes a hacker's computer just 10 minutes to crack. But make those letters upper-case and it takes 10 hours for it to randomly work out your password.

Also read: Firms warn staff of iPhone, iPad hacking

Add numbers and/or symbols to your password and the hacker's computer has to work for 18 days.

Despite widespread warning, 50 percent of people choose a common word or simple key combination for their password, the Daily Mail reports.

The most used passwords are 123456, password, 12345678, qwerty and abc123.

Also read: Hacking HTTP status codes

However, the security conscious among you may want to try this - choose a nine letter password that includes numbers and/or symbols as this would take a hacker's computer a staggering 44,530 years to break.

In December, media firm Gawker urged subscribers to change their passwords after its user database was hacked and more than 1.3 million passwords were stolen.

The company, which runs a series of irreverent blogs on media and technology, warned that simple passwords could be vulnerable to attacks by hackers' computers.

Also read: Strong password not enough to protect