Importance of Good Password Hygiene
Poor password hygiene is one of the primary reasons for data breaches in businesses and of personal accounts. Maintaining strong password habits will help ensure your data stays safe and secure.
Use Strong Passwords
Your password’s strength against cyber-attacks is highly dependent on its complexity. The more complex your password, the harder it will be for hackers to infiltrate your accounts. Creating long, complex, and unique passwords to prevent hackers from cracking your code. Strong passwords are usually more than eight (maybe even 12) characters, contain upper and lowercase characters, and use different numbers and symbols. If you think you’ll have trouble remembering your password, there are a couple of mental models that can help, like using the first characters of a memorable phrase.
For example, let’s take the popular idiom, “time flies when you’re having fun.” Your password could be “TfWYhF238#9%.” This password contains more than eight characters, upper and lowercase characters, as well as multiple numbers and symbols.
Some password management evangelists suggest using passphrases instead of passwords. Passphrases are like passwords, but uses a sentence, series, or combination of words and contain more characters. They can also contain numbers and special characters. For example, Dog8MyLunch!
Never Use the Same Password
While it might seem like an easy option to reuse the same password for multiple applications and devices, what happens when that password is stolen? The hacker can gain access to all your accounts, both personal and work related. Your one mistake of using the same password could seriously compromise your company. Make sure to create a different password for each of your accounts. By making each password or passphrase long and unique, you’re greatening the lengths they would have to go through to hack into your account.
Change Your Passwords On A Regular Basis.
Try as you might to protect yourself. The services and organizations you have passwords with have proven time and time again that their systems aren’t completely hack-proof. An organization’s user account data can be hacked and undetected for a long time, months or even years. Changing your password regularly will prevent a past data hack from exposing your current passwords.
Use multi-factor authentication whenever possible.
Multi-factor authentication adds another layer of security and protection beyond just entering a password. Examples of multi-factor authentication include one-time use text or email codes, using an authentication app, or facial or fingerprint recognition. Additional authentication will prevent access to your accounts if your password is hacked.
Use A Password Manager
Having unique passwords for each account and changing passwords often can be difficult to manage. The use of a password manager can make all of this very easy. Password managers are easy to use and can be accessed on your computer and smart phones. Just don’t lose the password to your password manager. Regardless of the password manager you use, it’s important to protect your data with a strong master password.
Password Manager Recommendations:
LastPass is what Hoffman York uses as an enterprise tool. There is also a free personal service offering that works on nearly every platform and device available.
1Password is highly recommended and has easy-to-use, polished apps that will work on Windows PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and the major Web browsers. Its Watchtower feature helps you identify and change weak, reused, or compromised passwords, and 1Password walks you through correcting these problems in clear, easy-to-follow language. 1Password protects your passwords with strong encryption and good security practices. ·
The free version of Bitwarden covers all the basics of a good password manager and doesn’t cost anything. But it lacks a feature that checks password strength and doesn’t have encrypted file storage.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-password-managers/