One Password to Rule Them All? Your ‘Sauron’ Moment
How many passwords are you using right now? You’re using one for your Facebook account, Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, WordPress… and for hundreds of others social networks and websites. Taking that into consideration, there are two types of people: the ones who have different passwords for each of those accounts and the other ones, with the same password for every account.
No matter which one you are, having some self-password-discipline might be a good idea. The Internet is full of mean people who will try to hack into your social and email accounts, so here’s some advice on creating a secure and good password which will make your online life a bit more secure.
Create a Strong Password
Passwords which have the name of your pet, mother or some close person, 1111 or abc123 are very unsecure passwords. When an attacker tries to hack into your account, they will use so-calledd brute force and dictionary attack methods where those kind of easy passwords will be the first ones to try out. The attacker needs only a few seconds to break your password.
The solution: create a password consisting of letters, numbers and special characters. Make it at least 8 characters long. You’ve probably wondering how you will remember it? Easy – create it out of ordinary items. Let’s say you’re currently sitting at a desk looking at your monitor, right? Desk – Monitor; D3skM0n1t0R. There you have it, your new, more secure password.
One Password to Rule Them All?
You might be tempted to use the same password for all your online account, assuming your password is pretty secure. But this is something you should avoid. If an attacker gets to your password, the first thing he’ll try to do is to hack into your other accounts, simply by guessing your username and trying the hacked password.
However, it’s not really practical to have severals dozens of complicated passwords, so here’s what you can do to have the same password, but yet different: add the name of the service to it. D3skM0n1t0R-GM4il. Got it? Or put “Gm4il” at the beginning of the password, or in the middle or something similar. That way, hackers will have a hard time breaking in.
There is one last thing you can do for your password security – you could use password managers like 1Password, KeePass or LastPass. They all have the same purpose; to remember your password for you. They’ll even learn when and where to enter them in your browser so you’ll hardly have to do anything yourself. However, be careful; those applications can generate extremely complex password that are practically impossible to remember. What if you forget the master password or you’re in a situation where your “key chain” is unavailable and you need the password? Think about it and how you’re going to use them.
Oh, one more thing: don’t talk about your passwords with anyone. Your passwords are your own and you are their best keeper. As the old Internet story says: Passwords are like underpants; we all have them, but we don’t want to share them.
What are your tips for safer and better passwords?
