Top 5 Password Tips to Protect your Accounts
Every day we need to access different websites on our laptops and mobile phones, whether a social media account like Facebook, an email inbox like Gmail, a shopping platform like Amazon, or a magazine subscription like Forbes.
Signing up to these different platforms and others requires using personal access credentials, and while it might seem an easy thing to do, there are a lot of precautions that we have to consider when choosing a password. This article will introduce you to the top five tips to help you to protect your accounts and generate more robust passwords hackers cannot easily crack. If you don’t have time to read, you can quickly jump here for a recommended password generator. Here you can find the best background check services.
Don’t Use Personal Information
When choosing a password, don’t you ever use a piece of personal information as part of your password, for example, your birth date, your wife’s name, your anniversary, or any kind of information related to your family or friends. Hackers can quickly look for such information on the internet and use it in specific software to generate various possibilities. These hacking tools predict passwords based on statistics about human primitive thinking.
When hackers try accessing your account, don’t expect them to try these passwords one-by-one manually because there are dedicated tools that would generate and try the passwords in real-time to access your accounts. If your credentials are unpredictable, you will prevent these tools from figuring out your passwords.
Don’t Use the Same Password
Source: achievalife.com
Many of us commit the mistake of using the same password repeatedly for many websites and logins. In this case, once a hacker finds a way to any of your accounts, all other accounts will be vulnerable. Sometimes people use the same password with a minor change like making the last character different for each account, but this is also a weak practice because it can be predicted easily by a professional hacking tool.
Sequences of Letters or Numbers
Sometimes we want to generate an easy password that we can remember, and we end up using sequences of letters and numbers like “1234” or “abcd.” The second biggest mistake is combining sequences of numbers and letters like “1234abcd” because a beginner hacker could easily break this. Avoid these practices by all means and come up with more complicated patterns.
Use a Password Manager
Source: lawyer-monthly.com
If you have multiple accounts and sensitive information, you might consider using an enterprise password manager to avoid saving all your passwords on your desktop or a piece of paper. Many people would think it is safe to keep your passwords and access credentials in a notepad or a sticky note, but this is not safe because it means your private accounts might be exposed to others.
A password manager is security software that saves an encrypted version of all your passwords and other login credentials and only allows authorized access to this information after a strict authentication.
Use the Password Generator
A password generator is software that generates different kinds of passwords for your different uses. All the generated passwords will be unique and unbreakable because password generators rely on complicated mathematical procedures to build unpredictable passwords that no hacking tool can break. Some password generators would also provide the ability to keep a record of all the generated passwords in a way that can be restored in the future only by the users themselves.
Usually, the passwords would contain a random combination of letters, numbers, small and capital letters, and sometimes other characters like dashes and dollar signs. Don’t panic when you see such a password because this is the only way to keep your data and accounts safe from others.
Conclusion
While you might think that you have everything under control by keeping your passwords in a notepad on your desktop, something terrible could happen in a blink of an eye resulting in the loss of valuable information. Don’t hesitate to secure your virtual world by using advanced technologies, and if you don’t have time, search the internet for a good password generator.
