Password Strength Indicator

To help you to choose a secure password this website provides a visual indicator so you can easily spot weak passwords and substitute them with a stronger one.

When typing your chosen password the visual indicator displays a coloured bar and short description (ranging from 'Weak' to 'Very strong') under the password field. The bar length and colour will dynamically change accordingly to the strength of the password. Adding more characters and/or selecting them from multiple sets (lower and upper case letters, capital letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.) will increase the length and shift the colour from red ('Weak') through orange and toward green ('Very strong').

To comply with industry security standards for online accounts and transactions this website will not accept a password that is weak. Only passwords classed as 'Medium' to 'Very strong' will be accepted.

The following criteria are used for determining if your password is secure enough to be accepted:

• It must be at least 7 characters long
• It must have at least one number and one letter
• It must not be easy for others to guess so letter or number strings such as 'abc' or '1234' will not be accepted

Additional criteria for creating a strong password:

• Use a mixture of upper and lower case characters
• Use special characters i.e.! $ % ^ & * ( ) _ - # ~ @ ? (illegal characters are displayed below)
• Use 13 or more characters

The following may NOT be used in your password:

• Illegal characters including ' : ; " < > [ ] { } + = / | ` , . £
• The same character more than twice in succession i.e. 'sss' or '333'