For this episode of One-Minute Wednesday, Dan Myers will be discussing a few tips for creating secure passwords and keeping them safe from hackers. With millions of user credentials compromised by each new security breach, it’s important to know what steps you should take to protect yourself.
Creating Secure Passwords
As technology continues to advance and work its way into every aspect of our lives, hackers have increasingly lucrative targets as a single password can give access to someone’s entire digital life. Consequently it’s becoming increasingly important to create strong passwords and know how to protect them.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating a password:
- First, the most important thing is to never tell anyone your password, not even TechMD analysts. Giving out your password is the easiest way to compromise your security, especially as hackers are turning to phishing and social engineering scams where they trick people into giving up sensitive information.
- Second, make sure your passwords are as complex as possible. Dedicated password-cracking servers can try more than one billion combinations every second, so you want a password that is complex and hard to guess. This means a password that has at least 10 characters and includes a combination of upper case, lower case, numbers, and punctuation.
- Third, once you’ve come up with a strong complex password, make sure to never use the same one for multiple accounts. If your password is guessed or compromised by someone with malicious intent, every single account that uses that same password could be compromised.
- Finally, many websites ask for security questions in case you lose your password. When coming up with the answers for these, keep in mind that most answers are easily searchable via Google or social media websites. It’s generally a good idea to choose answers that only you know, or slightly misspell your answers.
We know keeping track of a bunch of different passwords can be tough. Stay tuned for next week’s episode, where we’ll talk about LastPass, our favorite password management tool, which allows you to securely store hundreds of passwords rather than having to remember each one.
