Sophos Reveals How To Pick A Strong Password For Yourself

Do you remember last year when the infamous CIMB incident occurred and a lot of users had their savings transferred out to PayPal? The bank immediately encouraged their users to change their passwords to avoid any mishaps from happening. Changing your password helps, but only if it is complex yet easy for the owner to remember.

Continuing with the topic, network and endpoint security provider Sophos has given some tips on how you can pick a strong password to secure your accounts, regardless if it’s for your online banking or even social media usage.

It turns out that you can built your very own password cracker, all you need is $20,000 in your hand. With the cracker, it can try out more than 100,000,000,000 passwords every second. This means that you could possibly churn through every possible 8-letter password in just 2 seconds, and every 9-letter password in under a minute, which is rather concerning.

In the video, Sophos has given the tips to create your very own password that’s concrete, which includes;

1.  Make your passwords hard to guess
2. Go as long and complex as you can
3. Consider using a password manager
4. One account, one password

As you can tell, the first point doesn’t encourage you to put something that’s common, whether it being a birth date, the name of an artist, something that you personally like, or the likes. With a long password, it will take more time and effort for hackers to hack (just be sure that it’s not easy to guess though!). The third and fourth point kind of correlates with one another. It’ll be safer if you have a password for each individual account, so if one gets known, other personal accounts can’t be accessed. To keep a track on your passwords, you simply use a password manager, you know, just in case if you forget on what they are.

Another thing that you’d be wise to remember is to always use Two-step verification when it’s available. It’s not on the list because it doesn’t allow you to pick your very own password, but it is still a safe form of protection. Any transaction or login will require a code that will be sent to device that you’ve registered.

Pokdepinion: These tips might look like a hassle to some but hey, it’s better to be safe than sorry no?