In Depth: What can you do to protect your info from hackers

Following the growth of electronic privacy concerns related to hacking and social media, CNN is featuring an "In Depth: End of Privacy" series all this week.

Mario Armstrong, host of SiriusXm's "Mario Armstrong's Digital Spin," joins Ali Velshi today on American Morning to explain what you can do to make your passwords difficult to hack.

In Mario's segment, he provided some ideas for making difficult but memorable passwords that will make it difficult for hackers to crack, including:

1. Make your password 12 characters long. The Georgia Institute could crack an 8 character password in 2 hours. Using the same concept to crack a 12-character password took 17,134 YEARS.

2. Don't use a word in a dictionary

3. Build a password from a sentence. For example, say you write something like "At 5 pm I like playing basket ball with 2 friends." That could turn in to a password that looks like this: A5p*Ilpbw2f!

4. Using uPPeR and LoWEr cAsE characters, plus numbers and symbols will make things even harder to hack.

Mario also talked about protecting your information in the 'cloud' or an online server. Mario suggested:

1. Password protect a file before you upload

2. For sensitive files, keep them on local machines or external drives

3. Put passcodes on any mobile devices

Mario also discussed keylogging programs, or programs that monitor everything you do on a computer and send a report to whomever installed the program. See the rest of the interview for more information.