Security expert reveals little-known password trick that’s a nightmare for hackers

Website sign in button — A strong password is essential to keep hackers at bay (Picture: Getty Images)

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.

Emoji 3d icon set. — Emojis can help add an extra layer of security to those important passwords (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

‘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.’

Vector Emoji red angry sad face — Don’t get frustrated if you can’t use emoji in your password (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

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.

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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.