Headings and subheadings help readers navigate text more easily by visually distinguishing between key ideas and supporting ones. Furthermore, headings and subheadings serve to emphasize importance by visually differentiating between main points and supporting ones. Cybercriminals often exploit passwords such as pet names, birthdays, and favorite songs to gain entry to personal information and siphon money away from you. You can avoid this situation by employing a random password generator and activating two-step verification on important accounts.
1. Use a Random Password Generator
Use password generators to generate strong passwords based on math entropy that make your accounts less vulnerable to hacking. A strong password makes it harder for hackers to guess. An effective password should include letters (both uppercase and lowercase), numbers, special characters, and symbols; you may use mnemonic devices to help remember forgotten passwords.
Use of a random password generator, frequently included with password managers, is an efficient and straightforward way of creating strong, unique passwords for each account. This feature prevents one breach from exposing your information across multiple sites at the same time while making it harder for cybercriminals to take advantage of you.
2. Make Your Password Long
Passwords are more than mere strings of characters; they serve as your first line of defense against cybercriminals and data breaches. Yet creating and remembering strong passwords may prove challenging. A good password must contain at least 14 characters that include uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols—this includes upper- and lowercase letters as well as numbers and symbols—without including any personal data such as your name, birthday, or pet’s name.
Password generators can help you easily create strong yet memorable passwords that are easy to remember, and then using an autofill password manager like Bitwarden will enable autofill across devices, reducing the chances of breaches that expose your credentials to hackers.
3. Make Your Password Unique
If you use the same password for multiple accounts, a thief who breaks into one could try it on others, a credential stuffing attack. Your password should include uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols to create a random sequence that cannot be deduced from personal information such as your name, birthday, address, or phone number. At least 16 characters should make up this combination.
Though strong passwords can be difficult to remember, they provide a vital first line of defense against cybercriminals and data breaches. Use these tips to develop positive password habits that protect both personal and professional information.
4. Don’t Share Your Password
If you share your password with someone, they could gain access to all of your accounts—potentially accessing and possibly posting embarrassing material on social media, compromising future career and education opportunities for yourself, or causing damage. An effective cybersecurity password requires being long, complex, non-personally identifiable, non-repeatable, and unique—making the use of a password manager even simpler in terms of creating and remembering strong, unique passwords.
Cybersecurity awareness training should be part of every employee’s professional education, regardless of industry or job title. Keepnet’s Human Risk Management Platform offers education combined with hands-on phishing simulations and compliance reporting that ensures your knowledge is put into action by your team—by decreasing bad choices made, your organization can dramatically lower its cyberattack risk.
5. Change Your Password Regularly
When your company experiences a breach, or you suspect someone has gained entry to your account, it’s always wise to change your password immediately—this ensures that any time your password falls into hackers’ hands, it cannot be exploited to gain entry to other accounts of yours.
But changing passwords frequently can make it challenging to remember them all, with no definitive answer on how often you should change them—although more frequent change could help avoid harmful habits like reusing passwords across accounts, which increases risk and opens access to all of your information. Changing them regularly also prevents harmful habits like using the same one across accounts; doing this increases security by keeping track of each one individually and reduces chances of hacking one account, in turn granting hackers access to more.
6. Don’t Use the Same Password for Multiple Sites
Many people reuse passwords because it’s hard to remember a different one for each account. Avoid this unfortunate habit at all costs. Reusing passwords can be extremely dangerous; if you use the same one across multiple accounts and it becomes compromised, unauthorized access could occur across them all, possibly leading to identity theft, financial loss, or harming your reputation.
Create different, strong passwords for each site you use with the help of a password manager. These tools make creating, storing, and remembering passwords much simpler without the risk of forgetting them.
7. Use a Password Manager
Establishing and maintaining strong passwords may take some time, but they’re an essential way of protecting yourself online. A password manager makes the process simpler and more hassle-free. Password managers are apps or browser extensions designed to help you generate and store secure passwords and automatically enter them on websites, and they can even provide additional security features like two-step verification.
Some password managers offer emergency access features that allow for secure password hints to assist if you forget your password, while others offer additional capabilities, including securely sharing passwords with family and friends or supporting password security training for their users.
8. Never Share Your Password
Password sharing is an easy way for hackers to gain access to sensitive data, leading to data breaches, financial loss, and reputational harm. Strong passwords should be long (12 characters or longer), unique, and contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols that cannot be easily guessed by hackers. Furthermore, such passwords should avoid providing personal data such as names, birthdates, or pets’ names that could make the password easily identifiable to hackers.
Password security training equips employees to select strong passwords to thwart cyberattacks, an essential first step toward maintaining an online environment safe for work.