Your passwords protect your most valuable information. Follow cybersecurity experts' advice on how you should be making these passwords more secure.

Our online passwords are the gatekeepers to our most sensitive, valuable information ― and yet so many of us choose weak options that are easily breached. (Sorry to tell you, but it’s time to retire “Password123.”)

For cybercriminals, “the No. 1 method of entry these days is credential theft,” explained George Kamide, co-host of the cybersecurity podcast “Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks.” “It’s so much easier for me to get your password somewhere else and try that than for me to sit there at [your] email and and try and get in, because ... most systems are going to lock you out after three bad tries.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A password is actually “one of the cybersecurity choices users have real control over,” explained Aaron Pritz, CEO of cybersecurity firm Reveal Risk.

To make more secure choices, HuffPost asked cybersecurity experts about the password rules they personally follow. Read on for their lessons:

1. They use password managers.

Every data security expert HuffPost talked with uses a password manager and advises people to use one too.

Instead of writing your passwords down somewhere you might lose and a criminal might find, a password manager does the work of generating and remembering unique, strong passwords for you.

“Your password manager is logged in on your........

© HuffPost