The Ultimate Guide To Password Management

We all love the Internet. How could we not? It lets us watch movies, meet new people, play games, etc. It’s a fun place and it even makes it possible for people to earn their living!

To keep everything in order though, we all need our personal or professional accounts for anything ranging from teen forums to PayPal. Creating and running an account naturally, requires a password. How else would it be truly yours?

With each year, running a safe and bulletproof account has become harder and at the same time, as important as ever. Cyber security is something everyone must now consider. Just try and remember the Sony that shocked the world a few years ago.

Common password management mistakes

We humans make mistakes, all sorts of mistakes. Our passwords and the way we create them are also not perfect and without even realizing most of us still make silly mistakes when thinking of a password. Let’s go through some of those mistakes:

Using the same password for each account

This one is a classic. We all have been there, especially in the early days of the internet. We know this is extremely unsafe but are too lazy or just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

The bad thing is, once an attacker hits an account of a person who has made this mistake, it’s going to be hard to recover. Phishing emails are the most common way to attack you and studies show that around 30% of all phishing emails get opened.

Changing a single letter in passwords

Another rookie mistake is changing just a single letter every time you open a new account. What’s worse is that people usually change an obvious character, for example – ”BeatlesAreTheBest” to ”BeatlesAreTheBest1”. If you do this you expose yourself to quite a bit of unwanted troubles.

Swapping letters for numbers

This sort of mistake falls under the same category as the previous 2. Many people believe that changing their password from «OhMyGod12678” to ”0hMyg0d12678” will make potential attackers’ task to break their passwords impossible.

They are wrong. The fact that you changed ”O” with ”0” is nothing won’t expect.

Predictive keystroke patterns

This one is not such a rookie mistake as many people do it subconsciously. You may never actually know you’ve only used letters located close to each other on the keyboard if you don’t sit down and think about it.

So next time you sit down and create a random and safe password, try not to end up with something like ”ol>0p:?090” and try to use the other half of the keyboard too.

How to generate safe passwords

Around the software boom happening nowadays, naturally each of us is likely to have more and more accounts to their name. This means thinking of a new, different and safe password becomes an extra bit more difficult. So here are some tips on how to generate safe passwords and remember them.

Use a random and safe password generator

There are plenty of free password generators on the web. It simply gives you a totally random mix of characters of all sorts – upper/lower case, numbers, special signs, etc. All you have to do in most cases is set how long the password should be.

The classic ”more than 8 characters long” approach

Usually, whenever you create an account, you see some hints telling you that your password must be at least 8 or more characters long, including an upper case character plus a special character. You can use the above-mentioned password generators for this purpose, but it gets trickier if you actually want to remember your password.

To make it easy to remember, try and think of a sentence you can always remember, for example ”Back in 1984 I used to work for Random Company for 5 years” and only use the first letter of each word and include the numbers – ”Bi1984IutwfRCf5y”. This is a strong password and one that you’ll always be able to recall.

The Passphrase

Something we’ve all thought about is putting together a few random words and we should be safe. This is actually true and backed by many specialists. The length and randomness of the words will make this kind of password quite strong.

However, remember to avoid obvious and commonly used combinations like ”beautiful pink little pig” or ”gorgeous young lady”. These are used together quite often in the real world too and are not considered very strong. Something like ”lighter alligator pony shopping” should keep your account safely locked.

Use a password manager or store your passwords on text or spreadsheets files

Password managers can become your digital guardian angel. Generating, remembering, storing and auto-filling your passwords they are definitely a tool you need to consider using.

If you wish not to use one, there’s always the obvious choice to use a text or spreadsheet file to store your passwords. This is a smart workaround, but keep in mind that anyone who has access to your computer, will have access to your passwords! So try and keep the end document safely stored.

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