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Create one password safe means to make as difficult as possible any attempt to computer attack your data and the data of the company where you work. Adopt best practices in creating passwords strong personal data is halfway to protecting the business networks where it operates.
Cybersecurity companies claim that at the weakest point of a corporate security system, no matter how sophisticated it may be, there is always a user who is careless with his passwords and how he uses them. online.
No matter how complex the system is, if there is a user who accesses personal content using passwords weak, this could be the gateway that the hackers seek.
We know that it is almost impossible to make passwords 100% secure, but we also know that it is possible, following some of the suggestions we leave you here, to create a password that reaches a security level of 99.9%. Now try it.
How to create a secure password
1
Do not use dates or names
Names of family members or friends, boyfriends or spouses, pets or places that are significant to you are words to avoid. The same for important dates in your life, such as birth, wedding, first trip or awards received.
All these words or numbers will make your password insecure. With social networks in full swing and with their users, intentionally or not, exposing important information about their professional and private life, everything can be known.
For someone who is a specialist in crossing information, arriving at a password this kind of thing is getting easier.
two
Use at least 8 different characters
The longer the passwords, but difficult to decipher. You must use uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols (for example ! or * ), you must not repeat letters or numbers, nor alphabetic, numerical or keyboard sequences (for example, you must avoid: BBB, 888 or qwerty).
Security experts claim that it can help to separate words by symbols or replace some letters of the original words with numbers. This is a trick to keep in mind when creating a password safe.
3
On the same computer but with different passwords
Do not disclose, do not share and do not write the passwords “in a safe place” so as not to forget, these are old advice, but they always work.
This is particularly important when there are people using the same computer, whether at home with family members or in a company with co-workers. The computer can be the same, but the access account must be different.
The best thing is to create an area for everyone to access with their credentials. This will greatly reduce the risk to which the computer will be exposed, better protecting everyone’s data.
4
For each service use a password
The reason is simple. Not using the same password for all the services you use means that, if any hacker discover your password e-mail access, do not also have access to your e-mail account. homebanking or to your restricted area on your company’s local network.
The ideal is to always have a unique password for each service, especially if they are services related to banks or sensitive personal data, such as your medical data.
5
Create mnemonics with “passphrases”
As you can see, creating a password secure, having multiple passwords, which are longer and have many different characters, can be very demanding on your memory capacity.
Experts advise creating passwords using a mnemonic, a kind of memory aid that will help us remember our password almost automatically.
In this case it works particularly well to use a phrase and not just a word. That phrase can be better memorized in your mind because it can follow the rhyme of a song you like or even a sequence of your waking habits. Anything goes as long as you maintain the degree of difficulty and your ability to memorize the end result.
6
Use the Diceware Technique
If you want to go further and create a passphrase with as much security as possible, you can resort to a technique very similar to cryptography which is called diceware.
The creator was the American mathematician Arnold Reinhold, who in 1995 developed the method using statistical concepts of randomness. The aim is to make your sentence completely random so that nobody can relate it to you and that it takes so long to decipher that nobody bothers.
Just use a dice, throw it 5 times and point out the sequence of numbers that came out. Then just find original list of words created by the author of the method, which was the word that fell to him and repeat everything again to add more words to the first one, forming a sentence.
If you prefer one english word list, also exists. Of course, if you add the advice given in point two to the words, just separate them with a sign or a number, put a capital letter here and there, and the result will be even better, because by introducing these variants you’ll easily get more words -pass for all your credentials online.
7
Change passwords periodically
You have followed all our advice and have already created your own passwords strong and now… he has to do it all over again! What might seem like a big bummer is actually one more way to keep your passwords always safe.
Imagine that you entered a server whose security was already compromised by a hacker that can capture your password without having to guess it. Even if you’re not going to use it soon, you might not be interested in it, it will be compromised because someone else you don’t know has access to it. But if you change it regularly you will greatly minimize the chances of that hacker to want to explore later because, when you decide to do so, it may no longer exist.
Maybe all of this is too much work for you, or maybe you don’t want to be memorizing lots of different passwords all the time. In this case, our advice is to use a software of management passwords to do that work for you.
There are many options available online and some with free versions. These software can randomly generate passwords, allow synchronization of passwords between different devices (including at work), allow auto-completion options and launch notifications of use of password repeatedly or when it’s time to change your password again.
All this having only to memorize a single password: the one that allows access to this application. Here are some of the management applications for passwords most popular right now: KeePassXa LastPass and the Dashlane.
9
Create a company password management policy
As you already noticed, the passwords of a company’s employees are considered the first bastion of defense against intrusions from hackers. That’s why it’s important to know how to create a password security for every service used by every employee.
It is important that all employees understand that, as with their personal information, they are also responsible for safeguarding the communications networks of the companies where they work.
It is essential to define an effective policy on the internal management of passwords and this policy must be very clear in an official company document that must be known to all.
This document must inform how passwords must be created, used, stored and how often they must be changed. It is equally important that it is written how to act if the user detects that one of his passwords has been compromised so that no employee hides the situation. This is the only way to guarantee that protection and damage containment actions can be taken in a timely manner.
We leave you here a model with the main topics that this document should focus on:
- All computers must have a password;
- Explanation of how to create passwords. Use our advice and if you need a lot of passwords per user, choose a password manager passwords for employees to use;
- Different passwords for different internal departments;
- Personal passwords as opposed to business passwords.
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