Your passwords probably aren’t strong enough. Here’s why.
Maintaining good password hygiene is important. But unless you use a password manager, remembering all of them is a miserable experience. Yet if we slack off–Google Chrome is very good at telling me about all the ways I’ve been compromised–we risk getting hacked.
Cyber security experts Hive Systems offer this handy bit of encouragement. Compare your password strength to the amount of time a brute force attack would take to crack it. Take a look and then go change your passwords. All of them.
I had a white hat client, a brilliant nerdy guy, here is his password method for all his clients…….
1. Pick two dead people from your life who are: gone for some time, whose names you will never forget and ideally with little/no social media. Grandparents and older parents are usually good for this, but I knew a guy who used his 2 favourite Ti-cats quarterbacks from the 1970’s.
2. Pick a significant date in their life, the beginning or end of is easiest, birth is better and harder to find in many cases but a wedding anniversary can work too.
3. Capitalize the first name of each, then the chosen date, for example, Robert661942 is for Robert who was born June 6 1942.
4. String together with an “@” or “&” or another special character between, for example: Paul641959@Steven971990. Use “PS” as a reminder if needed
This password is far beyond any brute force software to crack but is actually fairly easy for an average human memory, just be sure not to use your wife, hubby, kids or siblings.