Are You Sure Your Password Is Secure?

The Most Common Poor Password Practices

Create Easy Passwords

Reuse Passwords

haring Passwords Insecurely

Writing Passwords Down, or Storing on Spreadsheets or on your Phone

Skip Adopting MFA

Letting Browsers Save Your Passwords

Common mistakes and misconceptions

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Replacing letters with digits and symbols. This technique is well known to hackers so swapping an “E” for a “3” or a “5” for a “$” doesn’t make you much more secure
That meeting the minimum requirements for a password makes it strong. By today’s standards, an 8-character password won’t make you very secure
That it’s fine to use the same password a lot as long as it’s strong – what if the website is hacked? Do you know how the website stores your password? What if they store it in plaintext?

Guilty

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Weak practices – storing passwords in the notes field on your phone, does it auto sync to the cloud, iCloud or Dropbox
Putting them in a spreadsheet, even password protecting a spreadsheet doesn’t keep the information safe. Check out our blog on this and other security subjects.

What makes a strong password?

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A strong password is one that’s either not easily guessed or not easily brute forced. To make it not easily guessed it can’t be a simple word, to make it not easily cracked it needs to be long and complex. Super computers can go through billions of attempts per second to guess a password. Try to make your passwords a minimum of 14 characters.

Passphrase

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A passphrase is simply a password, that’s longer, it could be a sentence, with spaces and punctuation in it. The benefit of a passphrase is that typically they’re easier to remember, but more difficult to crack due to their length. For every additional character in the length of a password or passphrase, the time it would take to break increases exponentially. Ultimately that means that having a long password or passphrase can make you far more secure than having a short one with some symbols or numbers in it.

Is Your Password Strong

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