One of the biggest components of Cyber Security is our ability to protect ourselves from Attackers. One of the main things that we can do is not fall for any Phishing scams (A subject I’ve talked about a lot), but the other thing you can do is make sure that the lock you have on your account is as secure as possible. The best way to do that is with complex passwords.
1) Top ten list – For the past few years, I have seen article after article talking about the top ten least secure passwords. There are also the most used. The top of the top are always things like “Password” and “123456” and it’s always interesting because, despite all the evidence that they should not be used, they still are. If you ever want to look at any password you would like to avoid, take a look at this article. Some of the simple passwords that people use are quite amusing. What’s not funny is that they are still in use. This list is an example of what not to do.
2) More complex passwords are harder to guess – When you are making up your passwords, you need to remember is the following; there are 52 Letters (upper and lower case), ten numbers and 32 special characters on your keyboard. If you can make a password with numbers, Special Characters and Capital letters will make them harder to breakthrough. What is particularly important is making sure that you don’t always use numbers and special characters in different spots in the password. At either end is no longer an option. It’s essential to be able to put them in the middle as well.
3) More passphrases and less passwords – One way you can make passwords more complicated is to make it longer. There are only a certain number of long enough words to create a super-secure password, so you may want to consider using simple phrases to lengthen the pass. Livelong62prosper” is an example of the kind of thing that I’m talking about. The more characters you use in your passwords, the better, but I understand entirely not remembering something like “8&^78j9jh9^ggvbHuy7JK998”. In this case, passphrases can make a lot of sense.
At the end of the day, The Password you use to secure your systems is entirely up to you. If you want to use a simplistic password that may be easy to remember but could ultimately lead to you being infiltrated, that is entirely up to you. The trick of using any of the systems that you use, and use them properly, is to ensure that you have every available defence from outside infiltrators. Think about it like this; You wouldn’t leave your front door open in the middle of the night for anyone to walk in and take anything you wanted in your critical data
Are your passwords good enough?
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