How to stay safe online-Use strong passwords
Staying safe online requires a universal effort and can only e achieved through constant education and a change in behaviours.
There are certain habits that we can all learn, change and adapt to help keep our devices secure, protect our most valuable information, lock down our online accounts and protect our data from cyber criminals.
Education on all aspects of cyber security awareness is the first step
Passwords are the gateway to all your important online account logins like online banking or your work computers and must therefore be strong like a fortress or moat that protects a castle.
If you have a lot of accounts then your passwords must unique for every account.
There are 4 main requirements that a strong password must have.
1) The user must be able to remember the password.
2) The password must not be easy enough for another person to guess it.
3) The password must not be easy enough for a password cracking software to succeed.
4) The password must be complex and contain a mix of capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols
Sometimes you go to enter a password on an online account for the first time and the login page will not accept your password because it does not meet their password policies -What is a password policy?
Many organizations require passwords to contain a combination of capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols
A typical password policy set for an organization may be:
• The password must be at least 8 characters long
• The password must contain upper- and lower-case letters
• The password must contain a number
• The password must contain a non-alphanumeric character
The inclusion of non alphanumeric characters provides to a higher level of security because a password cannot be easily guessed or hacked by software using the brute force method.
Non-alphanumeric characters are basically characters that are neither alphabets (a-z) nor numbers(0-9).
Non-alphanumeric characters include symbols, punctuation, or other special characters.
Just look at your keyboard and type everything you see that is not a number or alphabet.
!, ” , £ , $ , % , ^ , & , ( , ) , – , @ , ? , : , < , > , { , ~ , # ,
Now you get the gist!
Add these characters to a password and it looks like nonsense to anyone who tries to guess your password
According to a password generating site http://passwordsgenerator.net a strong password must be at least 16 characters long. What do you make of that? can you create a password that is 16 characters long?
How to create a passphrase
A simple and memorable way to create strong passwords is to choose three, four or more random words and make a sentence with them.
The password Hashtag apple pancake syrup when put together is strong and easier to remember
(you can create an image of it in your mind), it is very long and random- a quality that makes it hard for any password cracker software to guess it.
Storing Passwords Securely
How do you manage to remember lets say 120 different passwords for different online accounts?
The solution is a password manager; a program that creates and securely stores passwords on your computer.
A password manager requires a single password to unlock the manager itself.
It can create new strong random passwords for you so you don’t have to
They also have a cool feature where they can log you in automatically at the touch of a button
Most modern web browsers offer the facility to remember passwords for frequently visited sites and ask you if you want to save it into the browser password management system. They should only be used on a computer that you have sole access to.
If you leave your computer unattended and someone gets access to the login screen they can login to all your accounts where the passwords were automatically saved
You should NEVER EVER !! store passwords in the browsers of public machines in places such as cafes, libraries and workplaces.
