A study of passwords used in 2017 has revealed that some people are putting their IT systems at risk of attack by leaving the key in the door!
Many people questioned revealed that they had used passwords as weak as:
- 123456
- Password
- Qwerty
- Letmein
- Football
- And the list goes on.
Unfortunately, we now live in a world where cybercrime is a serious threat. The risk of being hit by an attack is very real as many businesses have learnt the hard way.
We have a few tips to help you with keeping your passwords secure as below:
- Make sure your password has at least a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols.
- Ensure your password at least 8 characters.
- Never tell anyone else your password.
- Never write your password down.
- Change passwords regularly.
Tip for creating a password:
- Think of a phrase
- For example: Omwtmwtmam – One man went to mow, Went to mow a meadow.
- Add in a few numbers and symbols and you have a strong password.
- This way you only have to remember the first two lines of the rhyme
- Don’t only replace letters with numbers
- For example: L0nd0n is not secure – Any password cracking tool will have thought of that, a better password would be Lond0n%88$, this way you just need to remember which character/s you switched to a number and remember the symbol and number combination.
- Don’t use your birthday, if you can’t remember the number maybe pick a non-immediate family members birthday or an old friend, just make sure it’s not easily guessable.
