Maintaining secure passwords is critical to keeping your accounts safe from cybercrime. Whether personal online accounts or business accounts, without secure password practices, your information (including financial information) could be at risk. Poor password security contributes to 81% of corporate data breaches.
Follow these top 5 tips to maintain secure passwords and protect your accounts.
1. Create Strong Passwords
A strong password consists of 12-14 characters, upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. If you have trouble adding symbols to your passwords, try using them in place of letters, such as @ for A and $ for S. It is best to not use words that are easily guessed, such as your children’s names, sentimental locations, or pet names as well as avoid using numbers in succession such as 1234.
2. Never Reuse Passwords
Most of us have a favorite password. But unfortunately, reusing passwords is incredibly insecure. 80% of breaches are attributed to stolen, weak, or reused passwords. Using different passwords for every account ensures that if one account is hacked, your other accounts will still be secure.
3. Don’t Share Passwords
Sharing passwords is never recommended, especially in a corporate setting. If a situation arises where you must share a password, verbally is always the most secure whether over the phone or in person. The second most secure way to share a password is through encrypted email. Again, only if necessary should you ever share a password.
4. Change Passwords Regularly
Experts recommend that passwords should be changed every 3 months. This will help reduce the risk of data breaches by ensuring if part of the password has been cracked, the attack will be thwarted. It’s important to note that if you know a password has already been compromised, be sure to change it immediately.
5. Use a Professional Password Manager
A professional password manager can take the stress of creating complicated passwords and remembering them out of the equation. Password managers are able to generate complex passwords and save your logins to all your accounts. With a password manager, you only need to remember one password, but be sure not to forget your master password or you could be locked out for good.
For more information on keeping your business accounts secure, contact us at Computek! We offer comprehensive cybersecurity and IT consulting to help you determine if your company has vulnerabilities and what you can do to prevent data breaches.
Book online at Computekonline.com or call 512-869-1155
