Password Security – World Password Day

So it’s not just Star Wars day today, we discovered earlier on that today is, in fact, World Password Day! which seems like the perfect opportunity to share our knowledge on optimising your password strength.

What is World Password Day?

World Password Day is a day where as an online community we come together and aim to improve our passwords strength to prevent as many successful hack attempts across the globe. Since that is the aim we’re going to share some specialist techniques on how to improve your password strength.

What not to do

So before we get into what you can do to improve the strength of our passwords we need to go over what you absolutely can’t do. Personal passwords are absolutely off limits. You may think that your middle name followed by your birthday is discrete, but if someone has the skill to get into a position to hack you, you can bet they have the skill to find a bit of personal information about you and that info is the first thing they’ll use to attempt a hack.

Imagine your personal information as an innocent seal and the hacker as a vicious shark, the seal is going to be picked apart until nothing remains of use (apologies for the vivid image).

Never Recycle

Recycling passwords is an incredibly bad idea even for people with an incredibly complex password. The fact of the matter is if you do recycle a password and someone cracks the code they now have access to all your online accounts. Play it safe and generate a new one every time you create a new account.

 What you can do

Okay now that the things you need to avoid are out of the way, let’s talk about what you can do. First up, use tools. Online software exists that can generate a complex password for you immediately and some websites even have this software implemented, you can also use software such as Two Factor Auth which essentially gives your password more steps by asking a user for some information that only the user will know.

Increasing the length of your password is a fantastic way to optimise your account security. The longer the better is the basic rule. Just add anything you can remember on to your password to make it as hard to guess as possible.

A little-known tip is switching up your password, it is actually a very effective way of maintaining the security of your account. Every few months change your password to something unique since you never know when someone is closing in on accessing your accounts!

A Final Word

Just a few simple tips really but they’re going to go a long way in improving your online safety. It’s better to be proactive than reactive when it comes to your online security so don’t wait until you get hacked to take action, get out there asap and optimise your web security! if you have fallen prey to a hacking attempt, then get in contact here.