There’s a number of great password manager solutions available nowadays, making it less painful to memorize every single symbol combination for a zillion websites that you’re registered on. However, it’s still common to neglect two of the most important rules of Internet security: ‘don’t be too obvious’ and ‘don’t reuse the same password’.
With a pair of notable remote support tools being hit by cyber-attacks in the recent days, we wanted to take a moment and share some of the best practices on how to improve the strength of your passwords and reduce the risk of unauthorized access to your account.
- The longer – the better. Create a password that’s long enough. The definition of “password length” may vary, but many agree that it should have a minimum of 12 characters.
- Include a mix of letters, digits, capital and lower-case letters, as well as punctuation (depends on whether it’s allowed to use different punctuation marks on a certain website).
- Make sure it’s not a place, a dictionary word, or a combination of dictionary words. This one may not seem that obvious, but crackers use sophisticated algorithms to search through plenty of dictionaries that come up with possible word combinations.
- Make sure it’s not an obvious association with you that can be easily found on your social media profiles. That is, if you’re posting too many pictures of your dog on Facebook or Instagram, don’t choose its name as your password. Even if you replace some characters with digits, it’s way too simple to break down, so again: don’t be too obvious.
- Don’t use the same password twice! Reusing your password on multiple websites can easily compromise it. Fraudsters, in turn, can use your leaked password to access your accounts on other websites. So don’t be too lazy crafting different combinations. The more lengthy passwords – the harder it is for potential crackers to steal them.
Note that these are the basic recommendations to be followed. If you’re eager to become even more password-literate, try one of these techniques that will help you create even more sophisticated, and thus strong combinations.
Nevertheless, it’s not all about password length and mixing various characters and numbers to trick a criminal.
Apart from that, consider the websites you visit, pay attention to your browser’s phishing alerts, try to do regular cleanups of your machine in order to detect password-capturing and other dangerous virus when it’s not too late.
Do you have your own technique for creating great passwords that has proved its efficiency? Do let us know in the comments section below! Find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube for more tips and how-to’s.