Securing Passwords

Rank these passwords from weakest to strongest. Scroll to the end of this section for the answer.*

a) password123

b) Tr0ub4dor&3rFurn1tuRe$30

c) My cat Whiskers was born in 2010!

d) P@sw0rd#2024

Password security is like the lock on the door of your house. If the lock is strong, it's hard for burglars to break in. Similarly, a strong password makes it difficult for hackers to access your information online. As you don't want a stranger snooping around your home, you don't want them snooping around your private data. That's why password security is so important. It helps keep your online 'house' safe.

So, what makes a password strong?

The best passwords are easy to remember, but difficult to crack. A good password is long, contains letters, numbers and symbols, and is never something obvious like your name or your child’s birthday. Generally, the longer a password is, the harder it is to crack.

Here are some tips on creating strong passwords:

• Turn a sentence into a password, for example, ‘My cat Whiskers was born in 2010!’
• Combine four random but memorable words and add symbols in between, for example, Banana#Duck#Pasta#Moon
• Use passwords made of uppercase and lowercase letters, digits (0 - 9), and characters that are not numbers or letters.

* Answer: a, d, b, c

By now you are hopefully convinced that strong passwords are essential. We all know it’s challenging to remember so many passwords – for example, e-mails, banking, subscriptions. It can be tempting to reuse the same password for all accounts, but it is a bad idea.

Passwords are like toothbrushes. Never share them! Not with your partner, not with IT support, not with anybody. Thankfully there are tools available to help you remember passwords. These tools are password managers.

A password manager is like a digital vault for your passwords. Once you save your passwords into it, the password manager autofills them whenever required, saving you the stress of having to remember various complex passwords.

The beauty of this system is that you must only remember one master password, the one that opens your password manager. Apart from storing passwords, it can also generate strong, hard-to-crack passwords. So, no more sticky notes or spreadsheets with your passwords scribbled down and no more password resets. If you do not already use a password manager, try one today.