Perfect Passwords

Ok, hands up – who here uses the same password – or the same group of passwords for the majority of their logins.

Well you would be in good company, as it is thought that about 80% of people do just that. Up until a few years ago I did exactly the same.

I had my old trusted group of passwords that I had been using – well forever it seemed! I had one I used for my banking. One I used for my computer login, and another I used for everything else, email, website memberships, app logins – LITERALLY EVERYTHING else.

Password Breach

Then one day, I was using WordPress and with the security plugin Wordfence. This has a tool that analyses the integrity of a password. It was able to tell me that my login password has been published on a “list”.

What this list was? Who knows? Where it was kept? No idea. Who had access to it? Now that was the scary bit – I had no idea!

What to do Next?

I then had to start thinking about the countless times I had used this password. Simply going through every site I remembered and changing it with replacement was going to take forever – and who was to say that in a few months the same thing wasn’t going to happen again.

Scary Stats

I found out some more scary stats:
63% of all data breaches are down to weak or compromised passwords
83% of data breaches go undetected for many weeks
40% of people have had their password hacked at some point.

Password Policy

With these in mind I decided on the following password policies for both myself personally and my company.

Never use the same password more than once – have a unique password for every bank account, website and other login.

Use Strong Passwords – A minimum of 12 characters, with a mixture of letters, numbers and special characters if they are allowed.

Never Discuss with Anyone – Only share a password with someone you would share a toothbrush with – i.e no one!

Use a Password Management Tool – These can be life savers. There are many free pieces of software the do the job – See Below.

Password Management

Using specialist software to manage your passwords can increase your security and save time. There are many tools out there that do this for you. The software I like is  BitWarden. This  is free for a fully featured standard version.

Like many of these tools It is cross platform, so it works not only on your computer, but integrates with web browser and your mobile devices.

It automatically generates secure passwords and stores them securely in the cloud.

I liked it so much that I bought the paid version, which also includes a tool for remembering all those annoying two factor authentication codes – for additional security!

In Summary

Don’t be lax on your passwords. It is not worth it. If you own a website, the more popular it becomes the more people will try to hack it. Make sure your password is secure – keep it safe.

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