What Makes a Good Password

What Makes a Good Password

By: Ross Davis

Chances are that you don’t work alone. Other employees may have access to; company profile pages; blogs; email contacts; files; even customer, and employee information. It is important for everyone who has access to have secure passwords. This may not always be the case. Co-workers may not be educated on best practices for password security, or they may just be lazy opting to use one easy to remember password for their accounts.

How many accounts do you have that use the same password? Ideally it should be none. But perhaps you use the same password for all of your online accounts. This means that if any of these accounts are compromised all of your accounts could be in jeopardy. Your hacked Amazon account could lead to your email being hacked, your Facebook, or (an IT department’s worst nightmare) your company’s network.

Every password is personal, meaning that it is the users responsibility to make sure that theirs is secure. For this reason its important for not just you, but all of the employees in your business to understand what makes a good password.

A few tips to remember for a strong password:
The longer the password the better. Many experts recommend using at least 14 characters.
Switching from upper case to lower case, using special characters, and numbers add additional variable to a password. Making it more difficult to compromise.
Mix it up. Password123 is much easier to solve than P@sS1W20r3D.

If you are wondering if a password you’ve created is strong enough check out http://howsecureismypassword.net/. A simple tool that gives you an idea of how long it would take a hacker to break your password.

An account is not secure unless everyone who has access understands how to use a strong, and unique password. The problem that can arise from having complex and unique passwords is that they must all be remembered, and even if a user understands how to create a strong password, they may not be willing or able to remember the many passwords they will require. Passwords don’t necessarily need to be difficult to remember though, and there are many tricks that can be used to create strong easy to remember passwords.

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