How many passwords do you have?
Everything happens online these days.
And with every online account you have, comes another password to create and remember.
The average person now has 100 passwords, according to recent research. Interestingly, this has risen from about 70-80 per person just a year earlier, due to all the extra accounts opened during lockdown (both for work and leisure purposes).
That’s quite a lot of passwords to remember!
What is a strong enough password?
The biggest feature that makes a password stronger is to increase it’s length. This means it takes much longer for a computer to crack it.
Other advice is to use a mix of upper and lower case letters, and include some numbers and special characters (e.g. symbols such as # $ * ! ).
Which is great, except that it makes a password very difficult to remember!
Using the same password across multiple accounts?
Don’t do it!
If the password is compromised once, ALL your accounts are at risk. Password information, once stolen, is sold on the dark web and becomes widely available.
Great! – so you need around 100 long, complicated passwords, including a mix of upper and lower case, numbers and special characters.
How on earth are you supposed to remember all those?!!
Well… you can get serious about the brain-training… you can write them down (disguised, of course) and hide them in places you know you won’t forget… you could employ someone to remember them for you… how about using some complex mathematical algorithm…?
Yeah, right! Or you could use a password manager.
Password Managers
A password manager is a software application designed to store and manage online credentials. Usually, these passwords are stored in an encrypted database to keep them secure.
The UK governments’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recommends the use of password managers, saying “Password managers offer an alternative, more secure, way of coping with password overload”.The NCSC also offers advice on helping to choose a password manager. Have a look at their recommendations.
As always, if you need any assistance making sure you’re secure online, feel free to give us a call in the datamills office on 0114 287 0510, or drop us an email on info@datamills.co.uk.
Stay secure online!