Choosing a good password

Key to a safe life is a strong password

Yes, that’s what has become important in this technology driven era. Once Cyber criminals get an hold of any one of your account, they can gather vital information, such as your bank details, address or date of birth and use it against you for financial gain.

Now, the basic question is, how to choose a strong password? Here is what you are not supposed to do,

• Do not choose password that would be obvious for anyone to guess, not just hackers. For example, ‘password’, ‘qwerty’, ‘1234’ or your phone number and so on.
• Take a look at this common password list and avoid choosing them.
• Do not reuse the same password across multiple websites. I know its not easy to remember all of them – tips on this later. Do not write them down anywhere.
• As per NCSC, never use the following info as your password, because cyber criminal’s first guess would be something personal to you.
  • Current partner’s name
  • Child’s name
  • Other family members’ name
  • Pet’s name
  • Place of birth
  • Favorite holiday
  • Something related to your favorite sports team
• Do not use smart substitutions such as ‘P@@5W0RD’, cyber criminals are smarter and have scripts to break through even that.

Techniques for setting password:

• Use random thinking. Its not easy, but use password in three words or four put together, along with numbers and special characters. Of course, beware of not making it easy.
  • For example, put together the name of a random football player, random beverage, random animal, along with the number of a football player’s jersey.
• Use software like “LastPass” or “KeePass” to maintain the password database where you only have to remember the master password to unlock your vault.

It is that simple. if you are mindful of these.