I’m a security expert – you can put emoji in passwords and there’s genius reason you should add them to every login
NEXT time you're creating or changing a password, consider adding an emoji or two.
Leading cyber-experts have revealed that many apps will let you put emoji in passwords – and doing so has a huge advantage.
Emoji are great for texting and making social media posts, but they can also keep you safe.
Computers typically treat emoji like letters, numbers and punctuation marks.
That means you can use them to make passwords significantly stronger.
"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," said Stan Kaminsky, an expert at cybersecurity giant Kaspersky.
"But there are more than 3600 standardized emojis in Unicode, so adding one to your password forces hackers to go through around 3700 variants per symbol.
"So, 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."
There are some other benefits to using emoji too.
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For instance, they're easier to memorize that a complicated "jumble" of letters, Kaminsky noted.
Hackers also typically won't use emoji in brute-force attacks, which is where they assault a log-in with a giant list of possible logins.
There are some catches to be wary of, however.
Not every app will let you input an emoji for your password, so you may have to use more traditional logins for some services.
Emoji can also be trickier to enter if you're trying to log in at speed.
And recent emojis in your keyboard might "give you away" Kaminsky warned.
To get the best of both worlds, consider using emoji to slightly modify a password rather than totally replacing it.
"A reasonable compromise would be to add an emoji or two to your password to up its complexity," Kaminsky said.
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"The rest of the password can then be alphanumeric, and less fancy.
"Of course, using emojis is no substitute for traditional security tips: using long passwords, a password manager and two-factor authentication (2FA)."