How to create strong passwords 19/11/2015
Strong passwords is a topic or an issue that worries society lately as its importance is increasing nowadays. Not only weak passwords is a problem, but also other ways which cyber criminals can get information with, for example through phishing.
It wasn’t long ago, on this blog, we discussed the false myths which exists in IT security and we discussed the importance of having a strong password and not sharing it with other people, no matter how close your friends are you never know who can get into our accounts and spy us or share information with others.
The importance of having strong passwords is due to the fact that we have large quantities of information in our accounts, information or data that we might not even know they are stored in those accounts on different services, that’s why we don’t pay attention to this fact and use the same password for different accounts in our email accounts, our favorite games or social media.
This practice can lead to a theft of passwords from the weakest point. This theft happens as the security of, for instance, your favorite game has not the same as the security standard of SecureKids, as they don’t need high security methods, so cyber criminals can steal passwords from those sites or games where the security standards are low and use them to have access to your accounts on more important platforms or services!
Some time ago, we already discussed the importance of educating children regarding the security aspect of different online platforms and technological services, and how essential it is.
Google can help us protect our accounts with My account where you can check the security level of your Google account, checking which devices you have used and logged in, add a phone number to verify your account, etc. Furthermore, Google itself provides a list of advice to protect your account in a simple and effective way.
This is why it’s important to have different passwords for each of the accounts we have and, most importantly, they have to be strong passwords. In fact, every year a list with the most used and vulnerable password is created. A list that doesn’t suffer major changes year after year, the most common ones are:
- 123456
- password
- 12345
- 12345678
- qwerty
But…how do I create a string password?
Creating the perfect password is impossible, but there are ways to create patterns which will help you get the strongest passwords possible, they won’t be perfect, but at least they would be so difficult to crack and guess by the cyber criminals. Here you have some advice so you can create stronger passwords:
Use different passwords for all your accounts.
As I mentioned before, it’s important that you don’t use the same password for all your accounts, as not all of the services or online platforms have the same level of security, that is to say, the security of your bank is stronger than your favorite game, but cyber criminals don’t care about that as long as they can get your password and use on your bank account, if that happens, you’re in big trouble.
Don’t use personal information.
It’s easy and convenient to use your birthday as your password, but that doesn’t mean it’s a strong password, even if you use capital letters or change its order, it’s very easy to figure out when is your birthday or any other piece of information related to you, we unconsciously do it on social networks, and…surprise! They can also see your profile. Besides, there are many ways to get your personal information, so it’s better not to use this type of information to create a password.
Length does matter.
In many websites where you have to log in, they ask you to use a password of at least 8 characters as Securekids does, but you can make it longer, 12 characters is better than 8, and that 20 characters is better than 12, so try to use a long password whenever possible to make it stronger.
Use letters, numbers, upper and lower case.
To make your password so strong so no one can guess it, you can’t only rely on simple letters or just numbers, you have to combine both and use upper and lowercase, creating a strong password nearly impossible to hack.
Keep your password safe.
You have to keep in mind that your password is precisely that, yours, you can’t tell it to anyone, not even your best friend or your cousin, because you never know who can see your emails or spy on your social networks. Be careful.
Change letters for numbers.
If you want to loop the loop even more, you can change letters for numbers so that way, you still remember your password and the possibilities of creating stronger password increases.
Include symbols.
To make you password even a bit stronger, you can use symbols between characters to make it longer and what’s more, making your secret password stronger. For example, if your password is ‘SecureKids1’ using symbols, numbers and upper and lower case, you’d get ‘S/3cur3-K1d5/1’ creating a password almost impossible to hack.
Para que estas contraseñas sean un poco más seguras, puedes introducir símbolos entre los caracteres para alargar más la contraseña y hacer todavía más segura tu contraseña secreta, por ejemplo, si tu contraseña es “SecureKids1”, introduciendo caracteres quedará de la siguiente manera, “S/3cur3-K1d5/1”, consiguiendo que sea casi imposible de hackear.
As you have different possibilities to choose creating your perfect password, you might not remember your different passwords and you don’t want your colleagues to laugh at you as they laugh at me 😉 What you can do is create a formula or pattern to remember your passwords for different accounts, for instance, you can create a strong pattern and make slight changes depending on the account, but don’t go crazy trying to remember what password you use in your favorite parental control system. You can use some letters of the service your using, date of creation (the year for example), or something related to you. An example could be “S3cur3-15-k1d=13”, in which we have used:
- S3cur3: the equivalent to our service SecureKids.
- 15: year of creation, 2015.
- k1d: or kid, something related to us.
- 13: the sum of adding all the numbers in the password.
For those who don’t want to make complex passwords to remember, you can always use a password manager, where you only have to remember one password, and the password manager will provide you with long passwords to protect your accounts in an easy and fast way. These password managers, like LastPass, o 1Password, provide you with very strong passwords, don’t forget your password for the password manager though, otherwise you’d in trouble.
Conclusion:
To create the perfect password is nearly impossible, but you can make the cyber criminal’s life impossible when trying to crack your password, for this purpose we have shared these useful tips for you. Apart from creating strong and difficult passwords for your accounts , you can remember them in a simple way.
On the other hand, if you can’t remember your passwords, you can always use the recovery option 😉
