Tip of the Week: Taking Your Password Practices to the Next Level

Passwords are necessary and annoying at the same time. They play a pivotal role in ensuring business security. Passwords should not just be secure; they also need to be helpful.  Let’s explore why it is essential to use great password practices, and setting passwords is just the beginning of something new for your organization. 

Don’t Neglect These Time Tested Rules

You should use an easy-to-remember password, but at the same time, you should not allow the hackers to guess it easily. Here are the top-15 results of data analysis from the security website Have I Been Pwned:

  1. 123456 
  2. qwerty 
  3. password
  4. 1111111 
  5. abc123 
  6. 1234567 
  7. 12345678 
  8. 12345 
  9.  Password1
  10. 1234567890
  11. 000000 
  12. 1123123 
  13. 1234 
  14. Iloveyou

Many of these passwords do not comply with best password practices, like a good mix of character types, and adequate password length. Instead people simply use easily guessable words, like “password” or “qwerty.” 

The worst part is that many owners would have reused these passwords across different accounts. Reusing can compromise the security of different accounts.

It is not a good practice to use the same password to log in to multiple accounts. In doing so, if one account is hacked, all the other accounts will naturally be put at risk.

How to Secure Your Account?

There are different ways to secure your account. Try using a  passphrase – a series of random words, rather than picking a set of characters. It is more secure than most passwords and is easier to remember.

There comes more difficulties when the human element is involved. Human beings are more attracted to patterns and face difficulties in random words.

A developer named Arnold Reinhold created Diceware, a software to generate a passphrase for yourself to tackle this problem.

Using the Diceware word list, roll five dice (or one die, five times), and to the corresponding value you can find an appropriate word. Repeat this process until you get 6-7 words, which form your paraphrase.

Why should you use the dice? It makes the process completely random than you “randomly” selecting words from a list of words.

An Example

Imagine that you randomly rolled the following numbers on the dice:

  • 21633
  • 31336
  • 16521
  • 13263
  • 33535
  • 52452

The corresponding words to this list of numbers are: 

  • Criss
  • Gluing
  • Choke
  • Bambi
  • Ice
  • Rust

This gives us the paraphrase.

However, many users hesitate to use passphrases because they have to remember six random words for each account.

This is why password managers are essential. When you use a password manager to save your passphrases, you can secure all your accounts and passwords with a single credential.

For different ways to enhance your business technology, subscribe to our blog, or reach out to us to know about MyTek, an Arizona-based IT firm, at 623-312-2440.

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