Hacking, malware attacks and stealing personal data – that could never happen to you? Right?
Well, with the top passwords as published recently by CNN, you might be at risk! The top ten passwords were hackable, guessable and lacking many essential safeguarding elements that we at Solve-IT always use when creating passwords.
Did yours make the list?
1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. qwerty
4. password
5. 111111
6. 12345678
7. abc123
8. 1234567
9. password
10. 112345
It seems that ‘password’ has been knocked off the top spot, but for something that is even easier to guess for a potential hacker.
Other popular passwords can include sports teams, days of the week or months of the year. People asking for your password in a legitimate way will never ask for the whole password. For example, banks will only ask you to reveal certain letters.
[Image by J. Kelly Brito via Unsplash]
How do I choose a password that is safe and memorable?
You should include the following when choosing a password:
Capital letters
Lower case letters
Special characters
Numbers
Seems like a long list doesn’t it? Some websites also ask that you have a certain number of characters. Using some clever choices of words and formatting, you can easily combine these requirements into something that is pertinent to you.
How on earth am I going to remember this new password?
You could use a combination of three words that are memorable to you, perhaps somewhere you have been on holiday, a pet’s name and then your favourite colour?
Maybe: fiji-rover-green1!
If that’s too long for you, consider changing some letters for numbers that look similar, for example, a 0 could look like an ‘o’, or maybe a 3 could replace an ‘e’.
Perhaps: P0tter
Then by adding maybe an exclamation mark or hyphens, these could then be combined to make a memorable, secure password:
Try: Fo0tball@19!
Of course, these are just examples and we wouldn’t recommend directly copying from this article for a password.
Hopefully these suggestions have given you an idea of how to create your own secure and memorable passwords!
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[Image by N Hirajeta via Unsplash]