Are Strong Passwords Enough to Protect Your Privacy?
These days, so many of the devices and websites we use in everyday life, including at work, require passwords. It is easy to become complacent and reuse passwords or make unique passwords that are very easy to guess. Password security has become more sophisticated over the years, but so have hackers. Using strong passwords can prevent some breaches of password-protected information, but other cybersecurity measures are required in other cases, especially to prevent large-scale data attacks. Consulting a cybersecurity expert is an excellent place to start when it comes to building a comprehensive strategy to protect your company’s data. If your organization has already been the data breach victim, you need a cybersecurity team on your side.
What Is a Strong Password, and How Does It Help?
A strong password is one that is not easy to guess, which is a higher standard than it seems, once you consider that hackers mobilize bots to guess passwords day and night, amounting to thousands of login attempts over a 24-hour period. These are some features of strong passwords:
The password should be at least eight characters long.
It should be case sensitive and should include uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and special characters (such as the ampersand and asterisk)
The password should not include any words that appear in dictionaries of the English language or numbers commonly associated with you (such as your birth year, age at the time you set up the account, or wedding anniversary)
It should not be a password that you have used for other accounts.
The ideal password is an abbreviation for a phrase that is meaningful (and therefore memorable) to you and only to you. For example, it can refer to a long-ago inside joke. For example, John Smith, who grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and vowed never to return after he graduated from high school, might use the sentence “John Alfred Smith is too smart for Toledo, Ohio” as a basis for the password JAS26e4*419. No one else would be able to guess the combination of characters in the password because it doesn’t make sense to anyone else.
When Strong Passwords Are Not Enough
Yes, your employees should create strong passwords, but there are other measures you can take at the organizational level to prevent data breaches and account takeovers. For example, your company’s system administrators should set employees’ passwords to expire after three months so that employees must renew them frequently. You can also require multi-factor authentication for employee logins. To look at the big picture as far as cybersecurity, a cybersecurity expert can conduct an assessment of the vulnerability of your computer systems to attack.