Your Way Around Poor Password Practices

Passwords are annoying. Just annoying. These days, you need a PIN or password for everything. Online accounts, phone logins, ATM cards, etc. There are so many that you can’t keep track of them. You forget them; and when you do, it’s difficult to come up with effective ones you can remember, so you procrastinate altering them for weeks, or even months.

You know this is bad, but the solution – the painful process of creating and memorizing new passwords – is sometimes overwhelming.

While you may find good password practices annoying, it is important to remember why they are important, and often the first defense against breaches and intrusion.

Importance and vulnerability of passwords

Passwords protect personal data – information you don’t want anyone to know. In personal lives, this translates into health information, private documents, and financial data. Professionally, it encompasses things crucial to the success of a company: intellectual property, client lists and trade secrets.

Passwords are the simplest form of security authentication and are cheaper to implement than other authentication such as retinal scanners, special key cards, and fingerprint machines. While a username grants you the identity for a device or computer, the password detects that the user is the authorized individual. In other words, they prove that you are who you say you are.

While passwords are vital to security, they can be broken down easily. Phishing and cracking is the process of breaking passwords or figuring them out to gain unauthorized access to an account or a system. Cracking passwords is easier for hackers than average computer and smartphone users think.

An adversary can crack a password in several ways. A simple method is to use a list program through brute force to crack the password. These are programs that compare lists of character combinations against passwords until they find a match. The underground web also has numerous password cracking tools available that even an average individual can use.

Social engineering provides another easy route for criminals to breach passwords: imitating someone familiar and asking the password via phone or email. Users sometimes even end up creating passwords that can be guessed by learning minimal amount of data about the potential victim. And when you’re juggling with a long list of passwords, it is unavoidable that you create poor or easy­to­guess passwords.

Freeing yourself from poor passwords tyranny

Now that you’ve read the importance of passwords and the ways in which they can be cracked and breached, here are some ways of protecting your passwords, as well as creating good, strong ones.

1. Do not use personal information

One of the vulnerable things about passwords is that they have to be easy for you to remember. This leads to many of us incorporating personal information into their creation. However, it is easy for hackers to obtain personal information about their targets. As a result, it is recommended not to include such information in your passwords. Avoid any nicknames, family member names, pet names, or usernames. Also, do not use any recognizable numbers like addresses or phone numbers that anybody could guess by getting your mail.

2. Leverage password management software

Password management software can save you from the hassle of remembering multiple passwords. Trend Micro explains that the best password manager is also capable of detecting weak passwords and making them harder­to­guess. Some of the offerings may also include keystroke encryption, which can protect your passwords from being read by cybercriminals. Additional features, such as web­based password management, will allow you to manage passwords from any location quickly with Safari, Firefox, or Chrome browsers.

3. Use two­factor authentication

This is when a code is sent to your smartphone after you enter a password on a computer or device. This is to ensure that hackers that breach your password successfully have to gain physical access to your device or computer for successful access, which is impossible unless the hacker is under your roof!