As every schoolboy and quizzer should know, 23rd April is St George’s Day – England’s patron saint. George is usually depicted as a knight defending damsels in distress against a fiery dragon. If you’d like to know more about him, check out our blog from last year here.
George’s armour and sword may have been sufficient to vanquish his foe, but they would be no match for the villains besieging computer users today. Companies can implement firewalls and antivirus software, but your systems – and your valuable data – can still be vulnerable to cybercrime.
As the old adage goes, prevention is much better than cure. Why take the risk of exposing your business information to a ransomware attack? Are all your eggs in one basket, hoping that your backup systems will ride in on a white charger to save the day?
Stop the cybercriminals in their tracks: choose strong passwords!
Hopefully everyone has now learnt that basic passwords do not cut the mustard. Indeed this blog has warned you enough times about the foolhardiness of using “password”, “12345”, “qwerty”, common words and names – just search our blog for “password” to check our earlier advice. Industry experts recommend a combination of letters, numbers and special characters, but these can be difficult to recall. Recent wisdom suggests that length is the key to an uncrackable password; concatenate 4 random words to generate a letter string which should challenge the most persistent hacker.
It is not enough, however, to have one strong password. It seems that we hear stories practically every day about large organisations whose databases are hacked, exposing their clients’ passwords and personal information to nefarious uses. If you use 1 password for all your online access, you are potentially handing a skeleton key to unlock access to all your data!
Our recommendation; let a password management tool take the strain. We use Dashlane to generate and remember our online passwords. Simply concoct a super-password to log in to Dashlane, and your password woes will be sorted. No more cryptic notes in your address book or post-its displaying passwords next to your computer!
Tired of being a damsel in distress, waiting of St George to rescue you from the cyber-dragon? Come to Computer Troubleshooters and you’ll enjoy the peace of mind of the protective armour that strong passwords provide.