Do you know that the most common password is either ‘12345’ or simply the word ‘password’? While I am sure you are smart enough to not have such an easy password.
But I am assuming you have a password that isn’t strong enough, at least from today’s standards.
It’s really high time you should get serious about creating a strong password to protect your online accounts.
Surely many services have started offering the feature of putting two-step verification, but that does not give you an excuse to not put all strong password.
In this article, we are going to talk about how you can create a strong password and keep your online properties safe.
Never use common nouns
The number one mistake people make is used common names which makes them prone to brute force attacks because even the basic list of passwords contains common words.
If you want to use a name of someone or someplace, by picking a different spelling of that particular word or maybe add a prefix or suffix to it.
Add special character to your password
Even though it is now a compulsion to add a special character in a password on the majority of the online services, you should make a habit of putting a special character so that it becomes a little harder to guess.
Use uppercase and lowercase
Throwing a mix of uppercase and lowercase into a password can also help you protect from brute forcing attacks.
The list usually has all the possible combination of words, and having a unique combination of a password will maximize the time taken to crack the password.
And having an extremely strong password can maximize the time to even infinity.
Use a random password generator
No matter how randomly you try to pick your password, your brain will always pick a pattern, in this is what we want to avoid. So I would advise you to use a random password generator.
Norton Identity Safe Password Generator, Password Generator from LastPass, Password Generator Tool by DashLane.
Don’t use the same password for all your online accounts.
This is one of the most common mistakes people make, people pick a password and put it across all their accounts.
This practice might make your life A little is here since you will have to remember just one password, but it puts you at risk on losing all of your accounts in the case just one of your account gets hacked.
You can use Password Manager like the LastPass, or even the inbuilt password managers available in browsers like Google Chrome so that you don’t have to remember each password.
I like the password manager of Google Chrome since it gets synced across all my devices where I have logged in using my Google account.
Another thing that you can try is, pick a common password and only change the prefix or suffix depending on which website you are creating your account on.
For example, if the password is for Gmail, you can add gml or any type of prefix you can remember.
The goal of picking a strong password is to delay any kind of brute forcing attacks that even the fastest of computers will take years to crack.
Bonus tip
Despite all the suggestions given above, no matter how tough your password is, your password still isn’t safe to use if it has been leaked in a mass data breach.
Sometimes hackers hack the database of a website and leak all the passwords of users that can be viewed by anyone on the internet. This type of hack puts your accounts at a higher risk.
You can check out this website to learn if your account has ever been hacked.
Or you should also be updated with the news of any such hack happened to the services or websites where you have your account.