Prevent Identity Theft with a More Secure Password

Published by Mike Matthews at March 30, 2017

Creating a secure password

Experts suggest using a password that is at least 8 characters in length, contains both upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and at least one special character. A special character would be any of the following: !@#$%^&*()-+]:”{/~.

Pro- tip!

Create an illogical two-word phrase and then pad it with numbers and special characters. For example:

secure password: 6CherryEla$tic
insecure password: jen1983

Longer passwords take longer to crack

According to https://HowSecureIsMyPassword.net, the password “6CherryEla$tic” would take 204 million years to crack. In comparison, it would only take 2 seconds to crack the password “jen1983”. Input a few of your passwords and see how secure they are.
Are you comfortable with the results? Try adding a special character to your password to see how it impacts its security level. This is a great tool to use to strengthen your passwords.

If you have trouble coming up with secure passwords on your own, there are websites that will generate random secure passwords for you, like LastPass (a password management software).

Variety is the ‘security’ of life

Once you’ve created a secure password, don’t re-use it for every account. 73% of all online accounts are guarded by duplicate passwords. If you used the same password for all of your accounts, and someone gained access to that password, they would have access to all of your accounts. With different passwords, that person would have access to only one of your accounts, which is much easier to manage and mitigate. For maximum security, different accounts/websites should have different passwords.

But how am I going to remember all my passwords?

Don’t worry, we hear you. You can use password management software such as LastPass, 1Password, and Dashlane to store all your passwords in a secure database that can be unlocked with one master password. Their information is encrypted for extra security.

Download our Cyber Security eBook for more ways to arm yourself against cyber criminals.