The Importance of using strong passwords
You are probably familiar with the importance of having strong passwords for your account. It is essential for keeping your information safe on the internet, and in the workplace.
In a professional setting, to protect your company and their information, you will need to use a password that is long, strong, and difficult to guess while simultaneously being easy for you to recall.
To accomplish this, consider crafting a password with a mix of numbers, both uppercase and lowercase letters, and special characters, with a length of at least 10-12 characters.
Avoid the use of personal information in your password
With the rise of social media, hackers can easily find personal information just by finding your social media page.
Hackers will often try and use these findings when attempting to crack your password, so steer clear of using personal information in your passwords such as, date of birth, friends, family, or pet names, where you live, school’s you went to, etc.…
You may think, “well I don’t use any social media”, but just because you don’t, many people in your life likely do.
This often means that information about you can be found on their profile, your friend or family member may make a post about you when it’s your birthday for example.
Strong vs Poor Password Examples
A frequent mistake people make is using a dictionary word followed by a number and/or special character. While this may meet the password requirements for most websites, it is not a secure password.
Poor password examples: Strawberry123, Strawberry15#, Strawb3rry77
Ideally, a strong password should be as random and as long as possible.
Strong random password examples: X5j13$#eCM1cG@Kdc or %j8kr^Zfpr!Kf#ZjnGb$
While Dictionary words on their own are strongly discouraged, turning a string of a few dictionary words into something secure can be strong.
Strong secure dictionary word password examples: Jigsaw%Quest7trait/fork48 or Tr0mb0ne&Fish?Qu1ck^side
Tips for coming up with a password
Try turning a long, memorable phrase into a password by using the first letter of each word. Remember, nothing of public knowledge!
- “I like to fidget with my spoon and it is the shape of a shovel” could become “IltFWms&iIts0As.”
Do NOT use a password that you have used before. In the case that one of your passwords are stolen, it prevents an attacker from accessing your other accounts.
Password Managers
Password managers are a great way of generating, storing, and managing your passwords for all of your personal accounts.
They encourage the use of completely unique, randomly generated passwords for every account that you sign up to and conveniently stores them for you.
This is achieved by only requiring you to remember one password (that should be very strong) which you use to get into the password manager, the rest are then available after logging in.
Usually, your account can be accessed via any device so you do not have to worry about your passwords going missing if you lose a device for example.
When it comes to managing your personal account credentials, password managers are the way to go, just ensure that whatever password manager you end up going with is reputable.