Today is World Password Day and we wanted to take that opportunity to have a discussion with our community about “Password Integrity”.
With every passing year, it seems like we need five more accounts for our business and personal lives. That means five new passwords and five new opportunities for someone to access your information or steal your identity. On top of all that, how many of you can honestly say you use a unique password for every one of your ever-growing list of online logins?
The truth is, it has become nearly impossible to create and remember long, secure passwords for all of our online accounts. The solution that most people have begun to adopt is the use of a password manager such as LastPass which is included in SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus and Complete. Using a password manager solves a number of problems such as:
- Generating randomized, secure passwords
- Locks your huge list of account passwords behind a singular “master password” or biometric password such as a fingerprint/face scan
- Distributes access to that list of passwords across all of your devices
While password managers are not flawless, they solve most of the issues make people and businesses vulnerable to data breaches and identity theft.
Making a password that would be considered secure consists of the following:
- A password should be 16 characters or more; our password-related research has found that 45 percent of Americans use passwords of eight characters or less, which are not as secure as longer passwords.
- A password should include a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters.
- A password shouldn’t be shared with any other account.
- A password shouldn’t include any of the user’s personal information like their address or phone number. It’s also best not to include any information that can be accessed on social media like kids’ or pets’ names.
- A password shouldn’t contain any consecutive letters or numbers.
- A password shouldn’t be the word “password” or the same letter or number repeated.
(Credit to Security.org)
I tried for years to create unique passwords that follow this set of rules and succeeded...for a while. Recently, I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t have the ability to memorize my 20+ unique passwords and was using the “forgot password” function far too often. Since adopting a password manager, I haven’t had to click “forgot password” because I only have to remember a singular, strong, master password to get access to the rest of them. It’s been such a level-up in my online life that I can’t imagine ever going back.
(For the record, I use KeePassXC since i prefer local storage)
What password solutions is our tech-savvy Webroot Community using? Cloud/Local password managers? Superhuman memory that never forgets 16+ character passwords? Leave us your thoughts in the comments below!
I’d like to credit much of the content in this post to our Writing team and this amazing World Password Day Blog they created. Go check it out to learn more about password integrity!
