Lock Down Your Passwords for Better Protection

Information Security

Lock Down Your Passwords for Better Protection

In light of last week’s rash of password hacks on some high-profile websites, we wanted to take some time to discuss how you can stay safer and keep your information secure when you’re online. You’ve probably already heard about the hacks that plagued LinkedIn, Last.fm, and eHarmony in the past week. Lots of passwords were stolen from these sites, and hopefully, if you’re a member of either of the sites, you’ve taken the steps to change your passwords on them. As an additional security measure, we also recommend that if you used your LinkedIn, Last.fm, or eHarmony password for any other sites, you change those as well.

As we said in an older post on this blog, it is very important to choose passwords which cannot be easily discovered. Today’s sophisticated hackers have scripts that run multiple password combinations to the tune of millions per minute. This makes simple passwords, such as ‘banana123,’ very easy to crack.

Passwords should not be reused for multiple web site and email accounts. They should be complex, and should contain at least:

  • 2 uppercase letters
  • 2 lowercase letters
  • 2 special characters
  • 2 numbers

You’re probably thinking, “How can I possibly remember different passwords for all my online accounts?” It’s true, having multiple passwords is a pain, but so is having your information compromised! Luckily, there are several tricks to ensuring your passwords are diverse, yet easy to remember. One tip is to take a word and, using the conventions above, create a base password. For example, we’ll use the word “pictures” to create “!P1ctur3S!” as our base. Now that we have a good base password, we can make small alterations to it based on the account for which it is used. For instance, for Facebook, we could add FB to the base password to create “!P1ctur3s!FB”, or “!P1ctur3s!TW” for Twitter, and so on. It also doesn’t hurt to change your passwords periodically to stay ahead of hackers.

We encourage you to take some extra time to update your passwords, making them stronger and more secure, and if you need assistance keeping your own website secure, contact the web experts at corecubed today!