The Do’s and Dont’s of Passwords
It is no secret that the majority of online tools and accounts require a password. Believe it or not this is for good reason and to protect you and your data. Password security is not a new topic and I am sure you have heard of it. You have probably heard of those crazy people who have a different password for every account, and who change their passwords, and use secure passwords like “J6dt@bxU”. This really should be pretty standard. An easy way that hackers can steal your password is by getting you to create an account or sign in on their website. They can do this numerous ways. Sometimes they will even make it look like your are signing into a trusted website (ex. Facebook), when in reality you are signing it only to their site and giving them your username/email and password. This would not be that big of a deal if all of the passwords were different, because they would only have access to the one account. If all of your passwords are the same and they have your email address, they now have access to all of your accounts. To make matters worse, if they gain access to your email account they can change your email account password. Even if you had different passwords for other accounts, once they have your access to your email they can reset your password through your email address. Below are some tips on how to avoid this.
Ways To Protect Your Passwords
- Secure your email account(s) – Use a unique and very secure password for your email accounts. I personally have two email accounts. One I use or my personal and important information (banking, online purchases, etc.) the other is for everything else. This is also a really good way to avoid spam in your important email! For those of you who use Gmail I would recommend looking into requiring a cell phone code at login. This sounds a bit much, but it really isn’t that bad. Essentially if you check this option Google will send a numeric code in a text to your cell phone. You will then enter this (in addition to your password) to login. This adds a great deal of security to your account.
- DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD – It is no secret that most of you reading this article use the same password. I explained above why this is a bad idea, but the question that you are probably asking is how am I supposed to remember all of the different passwords? My solution is that you don’t, you only need to remember one. There are loads and loads of different password management software out there now. Find a legit and secure app and put it on your smart phone. This will allow you to keep all of your passwords in one place secured by one master password (Make this master password long and secure please). Do a little research into the app you choose as not all of them are as secure as others. Personally I have used a tool called KeyPass which can be found here.
- Use secure passwords – Stop using passwords like, password, Password1, Your name, your name spelled backwards, or your birthday. It is pest to include upper case, lower case, numbers, and symbols in your passwords.