Password Rules to Implement
Helpful tips for keeping your identity and company data safe
Did you know the average Internet user has 25 accounts to maintain? Despite this, people only use an average of 6.5 different passwords to protect them, according to a Microsoft study. With identity theft and data breaches an ever-growing problem, it’s important to not only have a different password for each account but to make those passwords easy to remember and hard to guess.
Put the following policies in place to help protect your identity and keep your data safe:
- Change your passwords every 90 days. This might seem like a hassle at first, but hackers have a better chance at cracking your passwords if they never change. Also, don’t reuse passwords.
- Passwords should be at least eight characters long. Generally, the longer a password is, the harder it is to guess.
- Don’t use the same password for each account. Hackers target lower security websites and then test cracked passwords on higher security sites. Make sure each account has a different password.
- Passwords should include uppercase letters and special characters. Special characters include symbols like “#,” “*,” “+” and “>.” Get creative!
- Don’t use names of spouses, kids, pets, etc. All it takes for a hacker to crack passwords that include these things is a little research on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
- Don’t use passwords that include bank account numbers, credit card numbers or birthdays. Not only could hackers use these passwords to gain unauthorized access to your data, but they could also use these to empty your bank accounts or charge thousands of dollars to your credit cards.
- Passwords should be easy to remember but hard to guess. Think of an important event that has happened in your life and make a sentence out of it. Then, remove the spaces, turn a word or two into shorthand or intentionally misspell a word, and add significant numbers if there are none in the sentence. For example, if you adopted two golden retrievers in 2007, you might end up with “2goldenretreevers07.”
It’s important to take data security very seriously. Using effective passwords protects you from costly identity theft.
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