Password Security Tips to Save you Money
How can a good password strategy save your business money? Just think about how much it might cost you and your business if your password is exposed and would allow others to log into your accounts.
This business advice was originally presented by Google – They have some great ideas that I regularly use when creating passwords for the hundreds of sites I use. These ideas should help you protect your computer, websites and personal information.
There are all kinds of phishing scams for hackers trying to trick you into sharing personal information about your account passwords. If you think you’ve been the victim of a security scam make sure you change your password and security question answer.
Keep these tips in mind when picking a password:
- Make sure you’re using a modern browser with anti-phishing protection turned on.
- If you use Gmail from Google, they add a phishing warning to emails that look suspicious.
- Never follow and email link to change or input your password.
- Create a password that is memorable for you and hard for others to guess.
- Don’t Re-use your password for multiple websites, create a unique password for each site. If you use a common password and someone figures it out, with your email they could get access to your private email and maybe even your bank account and money.
- Use unique passwords especially for important accounts like email and online banking.
- Use upper and lower case with symbols and numbers where you can get 96^8 combinations in an 8 character password. There are 26^8 combinations for an 8 character password if you only use lower case. So something like #mIp4s5w04d is an example a great password for MyPassord.
- Don’t use simple combinations like 12345678 or abcd1234, these are too easy to crack.
- Stay away from passwords with your and anyone in your family’s name. Birthdates, addresses and phone numbers are also bad ideas.
- Create a password that’s hard to guess like sPo0kyh@Gm41l by picking and easy phrase and inserting random numbers, symbols or letters.
- Don’t write down your password and store it in an unsecured location
- Keep your password reminders in a secret place that’s not easily visible
- Don’t store your password in a file on your computer named passwords or my passwords
- Make sure you email is up to date for the password reminder services most websites provide. If you need a password reset, you want it sent to the right place.
- Stay away from passwords that may be easily guessed based on information you may have posted to social websites.
- In your secret questions, you should adopt a policy where you insert a special character in the same location, like maybe the fourth character is always an @ so Det@roit, preventing suspect user’s from entering it properly.
Keep your small business secure, and make sure everyone in your organization follows these policies.
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