We live more of our lives in the online sphere than ever before. These days, the average person spends a huge chunk of their time interacting with the internet, and more of our information and personal lives exist in the digital realm than ever before.
Due to this change, security is now a more important part of the average person’s life. When all of your data is online, protecting it becomes of the utmost importance. That’s why you might need a few password security tips to ensure you’re keeping up with current safety standards.
What do you need to know about making a hack-proof password and how can you best manage your various keycodes? Read on and we’ll walk you through what you need to know.
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Use a Longer Password
There’s a reason most sites these days require you to keep your password at a certain length. The more characters you have, the more difficult it can be for a hacker to get into your account and cause trouble.
Hackers use multiple insidious methods to break into an account. The most rudimentary of these methods is to simply put the work in of guessing your password. If you only have a few short characters making up your password, you’ve increased their odds of success by quite a lot.
These days, a computer can run through that manual guessing game on its own, trying a large series of letter and number combinations at a quick speed. The only thing you can do to combat this kind of attack makes your password long enough to avoid a quick crack.
A password with three characters, for example, might only take a computer program a minute or less to hack into. The longer you can make your password, the more protected you’ll be against this kind of attack.
These days, having eight or more characters in your password is highly recommended. That is the current standard for a strong password.
Do Not Use Real Words
In addition to being able to rush through various character combinations, a password cracking tool also has access to every word in the dictionary. These hacker-enabling programs can work quickly to push through word and word combinations that might be included in your password.
For this reason, you’ll do better to use random character combinations as opposed to real words. Combine upper and lowercase characters, string random letters together, and toss a few symbols in there such as + or $ for good measure.
By doing this, you’ll be increasing the complexity of your password and making it much more difficult for a hacker to guess your password and gain entry to your data.
On top of not using any real words, you should also not include any personal information in your password. Birth dates, names of family members, so on? Avoid using this info at all costs.
This information is generally publically available, so it will be the first thing hackers will try when getting into your account. Stick with nonsense that has no ties to anything and you’ll be much more protected when it comes to password security.
Change Passwords Often
Want an extra layer of security when it comes to your passwords? Change them often. For your more important accounts, you should be changing your password every month or two.
That might sound frequent and a bit of a burden, but it can go a long way towards ensuring that you are properly protected. This way, even if a hacker has gotten access into your account with you knowing, they won’t be able to get back in during the near future.
The longer period of time you use a password, the more you are putting yourself at risk.
By the same token, you won’t want to re-use your old passwords when creating new ones. When hacks do happen, your password and e-mail might be put up on some kind of database that hackers have access to.
That means they might already have your old password somewhere and can use it to get into your accounts. If you are using the same old password across multiple sites, it will only take one site getting hacked to compromise your data everywhere across the internet.
It’s much better to use a new and unique password for every account you have online. If you do so, you’ll create a hack-proof environment that can be quite difficult to break into.
Use a Password Manager
You might be thinking: how am I going to keep up with all these various passwords? There is no way I’m going to remember all of these.
You’d be right, the whole point of the process is to make it difficult for any password to be too easy to remember and utilize.
That’s why you’ll want to employ the help of a password manager. These are services that can help you to create new, strong, and unique passwords for each of your accounts online.
The program will then store these passwords in an encrypted location, ensuring no outside source gets access to them. There are a number of fantastic programs out there, though you can read about some of the best at https://setapp.com/.
Essential Password Security Tips
If you’re looking to craft a strong password, you’ll want to listen closely to the above password security tips. If you follow these steps you’ll be in a better position to protect your data and ensure hackers can’t access your sensitive information.
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