In order to create strong and secure passwords, you must consider many criteria. We have listed the most important steps for you to learn how to create strong and secure passwords.
- Avoid Common Words or Characters
- Benefit from the Combination of Different Character Types
- Don’t Reuse Passwords
- Use Longer Passwords
- Use a Password Manager
- Bonus: Enable Two-Factor Authentication
Avoid Common Words or Characters
We know that using some specific keywords in all your passwords is an easy way to remember your passwords. Your birth date, your pet's name, the city you live in, or the name of your favorite singer's album can be easy-to-remember passwords. But believe me, anyone need to be a top talented hacker to hack these passwords. Even someone who has done quick research about you can easily hack the password. Unless your favorite artist is Elvis Presley. This can be difficult to predict, as Elvis Presley holds the record for releasing the greatest number of albums in his musical career. Just joking, it takes 3 minutes max.
TLDR; You should avoid such easy-to-predict words and meaningful syntax.
Using passwords that contain common words or characters not only makes you the target of hackers but also makes it easy for people you know to access your accounts. Moreover, these people may not be from your close circle, even anyone following you on social media can easily access some private information about you.
Combining special characters, numbers, and upper and lower case letters can help you create stronger passwords. But you should be careful that the use of these characters is not in a certain algorithm. To create strong and secure passwords, you must use all special characters randomly. So, you should avoid common sequential characters like "123456" or "AbCd".
Benefit from the Combination of Different Character Types
We mentioned how important it is to use different characters and not use specific words when creating strong and secure passwords. Try combining these characters to make your passwords stronger. Many websites do not allow you to create passwords that consist only of letters or numbers. The only reason for this is to prevent fraud. You can also make your passwords stronger and more secure by using combinations of different character types. Try randomly combining letters, numbers and special characters.
For example; Try a randomly generated password that includes both numbers, letters, and special characters, such as "9DC@&l&2!m22", instead of a non-sequential but number-only password like "847283".
Now, check your existing password's strength. Do they include uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols?
Don’t Reuse Passwords
Wouldn't it be great to be able to access all your accounts with a single password? What a pretty dream, it really felt relaxed to even think about. But unfortunately, completely insecure...
You should choose all your passwords as different from each other as possible. I'm not just talking about the fact that they are not exactly the same, but you shouldn't include similar keywords either. For example; "Retable123" and "756Retable123" seem completely different, right? But believe me, they are not different enough. If a hacker hacks a password for one of your accounts, it will take a very short time to hack the passwords of your other accounts if you use similar or the same passwords.
Use Longer Passwords
Longer is better. Today, many websites require to create of a minimum of eight-character passwords to create an account. Yes, it's all about security. Anyway, longer than 8 characters are of course better. You can create a long password with random words, but these words must be unrelated. Please never try "onlygodcanhackme", Tupac has better lyrics guys.
Okay, well. Let's say you're writing such words as "HortensiaBeanCraneHalpert"
These are all completely unrelated words. But still hard to remember. And also not enough, you also should add more special characters. Let's try this way; "#>HorTensia_!BeAn{C]rane%HalpE.rt"
OMG! I even do not want to see it. But let's confess looking powerful. You need to do this to create strong passwords, but they're pretty hard to remember. It is almost impossible and not safe to write all this in notebooks. So, what you need is to use a secure password manager.
Use a Password Manager
Today, password managers are very diverse. Some help keep your passwords safe, while others help with more critical issues. For example, generating strong and secure random passwords in seconds!
Password generators can help you to create strong, secure and random passwords. So, you don't have to spend minutes thinking about complex passwords and constantly testing whether they are really strong.
Check this out to see a strong and secure password generator in action.
Bonus: Enable Two-Factor Authentication
Enabling two-factor authentication for all your accounts adds an extra security layer to your accounts. This is quite important. No matter how strong your passwords are, an additional layer of security is always better.
Stay safe!
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