What’s your favourite password? … I hope you were not about to reveal it, and I hope you don’t only have just one!
Today is World Password Day. A very good time, then, to think about your password security.
It turns out (according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)) that 15% of the population use their pets’ names – hope you are not using Fido123 – 14% use a family member’s name and 13% pick a notable date.
6% still include “password” in their password!
All this information is eminently hackable by checking your social media. It is amazing how many personal details people divulge on Facebook, making the job of the hacker easy when it comes to identity theft.
And if it was not simple enough to search out your personal data, you then obligingly help the cybercriminals out by taking part in random quizzes asking you to reveal your favourite colour or the place you were born!
You may appreciate the need to have complex and varied passwords, but it is so difficult to remember them all. I hope you don’t have a handy post-it note on your laptop or keep a little black book full of passwords on hand; so convenient to have this information at your fingertips but very useful for thieves too!
A large part of the support we provide for our service plan customers is keeping them safe online, including advising on password security. We use a password manager which generates and remembers unique passwords for each site – you just have to remember the master password to access it.
It goes without saying that the master password should also be complex, unique and be a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters. Don’t give away the keys to your kingdom by investing in a password manager but setting the master password to Password123!
If your business is ready to batten down the hatches and put protection in place, give Computer Troubleshooters a call today on 01732 300064.
As they used to say on Hill Street Blues: Let’s be careful out there!