Each year, on the first Thursday in May we celebrate World Password Day. It's a day dedicated to promoting better password habits to stop hacking. A password is simply a series of numbers and/or letters that are put together in a phrase that only you know that allows you private access to restricted sections of your internet. Passwords are important gatekeepers to our digital worlds, protecting our online shopping and dating accounts, social media platforms, private work, business life and general communications. And whilst they're so important, a lot of us don't take the time to craft a genuine and secure password.
And so in this blog, we'll be looking at the password do's and don'ts, along with providing some advice on what to go for when password creating.
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What is an example of a weak password?
Before creating a new password, let's filter out the ones we know to avoid. Your password needs to be unique, a phrase that only you can guess not the hacker sat on the internet. With this in mind, we'd automatically avoid using your birthday as a password because although a personal choice, it's also a predictable one. Another one to avoid is ordered numbers, like 12345 and 54321. If you plan to include numbers in your password, put them alongside other letters and use specific numbers. This rule also goes for basic words like 'password' and 'hello', again, these aren't unique and are very guessable.
To make this easier, here's our list of passwords that we recommend avoiding:
- 123456
- 54321
- password
- hello
- 123456789
- 12345
- 12345678
- 00001
- qwerty
- 1234567
- 111111
- 00000
- password01
- password1
What is a strong password example?
On most websites, it's mandatory to have a variety of characters within your password, though it isn't mandatory on all platforms, we still suggest following this process. Symbols, numbers and capital letters need to be flooding your password choice. We don't mean capital letters at the start of your password and numbers at the end, we mean incorporated within your password.
For example; let's make this very, very basic password somewhat stronger:
- password
What is a password must contain?
- Include random capital letters
- Add numbers within/at the end of the password
- Substitute letters for symbols
- Make your password as long as possible.
If you follow these tips, your password may now look something like this:
- p@Ssw0rds!03
We also suggest using a word specific to you, like a pet name, favourite food, or favourite city and customise it as we did above.
- newyork -> nEwY0rk!03
It's a very simple trick that's great for keeping your password original.
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Conclusion:
You may not see the need to overcomplicate your password, but these simple words are barriers to stopping your entire life from being leaked online. It's also crucial to never tell anyone your password no matter how close you are to that person. Another tip is to keep your password stored on paper safely in your house and avoid writing them in your notes app on your phone or laptop. Because whilst this is a lot more convenient if you forget your password on the go, there's still that chance someone could get onto your phone to look at them.
