‘1234’ isn’t a good enough password in 2022. Let’s help you increase the strength of your passwords.
Passwords are crucial to our everyday lives. Just think of how often you use a password to log in to your different services: computer accounts, social media, bank accounts, streaming services, etc. As everyday life is getting more and more digital, it’s getting more and more important to protect your digital privacy.
For two decades we have heard how we should make our passwords strong, so it would be difficult for hackers to guess. ‘1234’, ‘password1’, or other passwords that are so easy to remember, that they’ve become a favorite for hackers that can easily access your accounts.
Cloud online services have tried to force people to make better passwords by requiring a combination of capital letters, numbers, and even special symbols. But more advanced passwords can be made. Most people pick a password with a logic they can remember. But this is actually against the advice of security experts. A password should feature special symbols, numbers, and symbols, but it should also be in a relatively random order, so it will be impossible to remember for anyone but you: a password should be complicated like: “tC|w&a2*{5” or “Dingo8salsa{Gargle9goal$”.
How to generate complicated passwords
A good password needs the complexity like shown above, and it needs an amount of complex randomness. So how do you come up with something random just at the top of your head? You can for instance use a password generator like passwordhero.com. Based on your requested parameters you can have randomly generated passwords made for you instantly that will fit multiple platforms.
You can pick the number of characters, and if it should feature uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. You can pick between passwords, passphrases (that create your password like a phrase), or a pin code only with numbers.
One of the important features to use is to generate random passwords that would be experienced as random. Let’s take an example: If you are requesting a four-digit pin code, the chances of having ‘1234’ or ‘9999’ generated are exactly as high as ‘1209’, ‘1939’, or ‘0996’. With reduced randomness, these too easy-to-remember passwords are removed.
Password managers
Despite having strong passwords, experts now also recommend users to have different passwords for each account they are operating. Hackers have been able to get access to big databases of login names and passwords that they’ve leaked online. That’s annoying, but even more annoying if you use the same password for all your accounts. A password manager will remember these complicated passwords for you, so you can have unique, difficult-to-remember passwords for all of your accounts.
Find the best password managers at cnet.com. Then you use one unique password to log in to your password manager, where you will have the database full of all your other passwords. This is making it easy to protect all of your passwords, and all your it-defense isn’t threatened if one password gets hacked.
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