Most of your transactions online are made via a personal account with a password and rightly so as it contains all the necessary information for payment as well as personal information. It is basically your identity on the internet. With the internet becoming increasingly relevant in everyday life today, everyone needs to protect their online identity. May it be your Facebook account or online bank account, keeping your passwords secure is always the best option.
Keeping it strong
There are plenty of ways to create a strong password but password strength alone isn’t enough; passwords also have to be memorable. What purpose is there to have a very strong password but you’ll forget about it anyway? Password length is very important with this. Everyone has their own “break-even” point of not being too long or too short. Ideally though, this sweet spot has to be about 8 characters long. Characters, because the next part of keeping a strong password is creating it with some numbers or characters included. Some sites may not permit the use of characters but all websites would allow (and even advise) putting in a few numbers. They key here is complexity. It is much more difficult to access accounts with passwords that contain a mix both letters and numbers. You can further enhance security by using uncommon or complex words and slap in some numbers for good measure. It is also advisable to create passwords that are not found in dictionaries of any language. Cybercriminals often use complex software which check words in dictionaries as well as commonly used passwords and letter-number combinations.
To keep it even more secure, always remember that for every day that your passwords will not be accessed, it is one less day for it to be eventually decrypted. To avoid this, keep the cyber offenders on their feet by constantly changing passwords. Set the dates or times to change the password. If you’re too tired to keep changing it, then change it twice a month. If you really want to keep the password secure, then change it every week. It is important to follow a certain criteria to your passwords. That way you’ll always remember what to enter. This is important especially when constantly changing passwords.
In relation to the previous paragraph, never use the same password for all your accounts. The problem with this is that should any or one of your accounts will get compromised, chances are that the cyber criminals will try to access your other accounts using the same password. This is true as well for accounts in different companies. Keep passwords different for your Amazon and Bank account because it is most likely that criminals will go after the bigger prize if they manage to unlock one of the smaller accounts. This is true most especially if it is with linked accounts. Multiple verifications (with different passwords) when trying to access the other account will usually hinder the criminal’s progress.
Memory Gap
Some people usually like to keep their passwords simple because it is easier to remember. This can be bad especially for highly important accounts like bank accounts. There are actually many ways to remember your passwords whether or not it gets changed a lot or not. A good choice is to try to relate the password to a favorite song. Try to put a line in that song and make it into an acronym for the first few letters of that line. Building up a mnemonic of your passwords is not only effective but very fun but try not to sing out the song while typing your password.
These acronyms can also be used as a master password; which means that for the first acronym that was set, you can build up on that one by adding numbers and symbols or subtracting a letter and replacing it with a number or a symbol. This means that it’ll be very easy to remember all your passwords because all of them are a derivative of a single master password. Keep this master password safe at all times and never let anyone know what it is.
Perhaps the easiest step to remembering passwords is to simply write it down on a piece of paper. The emphasis is to write it on paper because if it is placed in a file on a computer, the computer itself could be compromised and the password list can be accessed. Keeping the password list in a secure place in the house will ensure that you’ll always remember all your passwords.
