Passwords are meant to keep your online accounts, whether in social media or personal banking, secure against unwanted attacks. However, people take passwords for granted. Trustwave, a cybersecurity firm, has said over 2 million accounts from Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been compromised. Most of these accounts used popular, easy-to-remember passwords such as “123456”, “123456789”, “1234”, and even “password”.
If you have been using any of these passwords, or any other password that is too easy to crack, perhaps you need to update your online security. Brett Molina of USA Today provides some suggestions on how to create strong passwords.
Go for complicated passwords – Basic words just never do its job in securing your accounts. Try mixing letters (capital and small), numbers, and symbols to make strong passwords. For instance, instead of “coconut”, use “c0c0nut”, with zero replacing the letter O.
Make your passwords long, really long – Most sites set a minimum number of characters in creating a password, ranging between 6 and 8 characters. Instead of making passwords long enough to fit the minimum, think of really long passwords with 10 to 15 characters (even longer). Take note that the goal in making strong passwords is to make it difficult for someone or some program to guess.
Create passwords from phrases, not words – “Passwords don’t have to be just one word,” says Molina. You can make passwords based on a phrase and give it a twist using rule no.1. For example, you can use “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” and make it “TqBfJ0T1D”.
Use more than one password – Trying multiple passwords for different sites is great, as having a single password for everything puts you at risk of compromising all your accounts even with one breached account. However, having to remember all of them can be daunting. You can either install a password management service and lock them all down with a single master password or just do it the traditional way of writing all of them down and keeping it in a secure place.
Source: USA Today
