Do’s And Don’ts For Creating Your Passwords

How long do you think it would take an experienced hacker to break into your most valuable account online? For most people, the answer is about 3 minutes.

The average hack time is low because many people make it painfully easy to break into their accounts. Using names, anniversaries, birthdays and other personal information that is also public information, or at least readily available on any of your social media accounts, is a surefire way to get an account hacked. Similarly, using full words in your password makes it easier to crack.

There are four character types available for any password, upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters like symbols and punctuation. Use a combination of all four to make the strongest password possible.

As you might expect, the shorter your password is, the weaker it is. Shoot for a length of at least 8 characters.

Since nearly two-thirds of people use the same password for multiple sites, when one site becomes compromised, a cyber criminal gains access to every account using that password.

For more information about creating strong, secure passwords, check out Denise Lu’s article at Mashable and the accompanying infographic from Instant Checkmate.

Even the strongest passwords don’t protect you fully, but they do make it more unlikely that your most precious data remains secure. To put more security in place, contact Geek Rescue at 918-369-4335. We have a number of security solutions for home and business to keep data out of the wrong hands.