System security and data integrity are the most sensitive issues in the world today. Whether it’s just your email accounts or confidential business accounts associated with clients, you must acquire password security and management skills. You can do it on a personal and an enterprise level.
Personal level Password Management
At the individual level, you can use simple tips and tricks to handle password matters, such as:
- Don’t convey your password to anyone via phone or email.
- Never provide Personal Identifiable Information in your password Name, User name, Birthday, Bank account number, Spouse name/Date of birth, Child’s name, pet’s name, and personal addresses.
- Keep changing your passwords regularly.
- Avoid using any single word that you can spot in the dictionary.
- Never use the same password for online banking as well as for social networking/email.
- Always use special characters in your password
- Keep your passwords lengthy
- Use a password encryption and management software program
- Don’t store your passwords in unsecured computer files like MS Word or Excel, particularly on laptops, notebooks, or iPads/ iPhones, as these are painless targets.
Guidelines for Personal Passwords Management
The most frequent blunder is making a similar password for private emails/online banking accounts and public social networks. Making and memorizing separate passwords for every online account could also be complex. If you want to handle your accounts with fewer numbers of passwords with better security. Here are some tips from the top IT support company – Mustard IT. You can read more about them at https://www.mustardit.co.uk/.
- Make groups of related sites, for instance: Private for online banking, Personal for email accounts, Public for social networking, Corporate for Business email and web access, etc.
- To limit the security breach, create a password for each category.
Be creative when choosing a password string
Here are some possible strategies:
- Use a phrase, quote, song, or poetic rhyme, and select the first alphabet of each word or line as a password.
- Try to use capital letters, as passwords are usually case sensitive
- To add entropy, replace vowels with numbers
- Use Punctuation to make your passwords complex
- Add length to gain strength to your passwords by using a unique prefix with your passwords, such as prefix string + password = stronger password.
- Concatenate common words together to create passwords such as fairy + cheese + wardrobe + alpha = fairycheesewardrobealpha
- Make use of the password vault application to ensure data protection
Password Security Management at the Organizational level
Managing passwords and keeping passwords safe are quite perilous challenges in a corporate environment. IT decision-makers confront it when they form security policies and design network infrastructure that involves passwords.
Here are some guidelines to tackle the management of passwords at your organization to capitalize on security and reduce the cost of ownership.
- User Identification and authentication process to prove user ID
- We can avoid security threats such as password sharing, guessing, and transmitting over a network by encryption and encoding.
- We can save passwords on a server in encoded form in a way that we can quickly change back to plaintext.
- To avoid the human error of memorizing a lot of passwords, you can write down passwords in a file, share passwords with coworkers or acquire help from the IT help desk, but that will make security more vulnerable.
- Try to compose hard-to-guess passwords because a human may give up, but software available to automate the guessing can try millions of possible passwords per second. To eliminate this danger, make sure that the set of all possible passwords is too large to search thoroughly.
- We can also use Unicode and other non-Latin passwords to elevate password security but not every system supports it.
- Carry on altering and reusing passwords every 60 to 90 days to avoid exposing
- Hold passwords secret to comply with an effective password policy
- Implement intruder detection and lockout to prevent invalid attempts
- Password synchronization mechanism assists users to keep a similar password on two or more systems.
Password Managers
We can efficiently deal with the real nuisance and impediment narrated above with the assistance of password managing tools. These tools can save your day in addition to providing a single ultra-strong “Master” password, that is easy to remember and difficult to guess. Password managers encrypt and save your passwords and repeatedly recall them as required. They can also serve you as automatic Web form fillers.
There are a large number of such tools available on the web to facilitate you; here is a list of some popular password managers:
- Kaspersky Password Manager
- RoboForm for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Browsers, etc.
- LastPass
- KeePass
- Password Genie
- SplashID Safe
- Dashlane
Utilizing these tools does not mean that your passwords are completely safe. There still can be a loophole, i.e., the “Master password.” If you create a high-quality password, don’t store it anywhere other than in your mind. Use multi-factor authentication, and the chances of hacking will be far less.
Disclaimer: MoneyMagpie is not a licensed financial advisor and therefore information found here including opinions, commentary, suggestions or strategies are for informational, entertainment or educational purposes only. This should not be considered as financial advice. Anyone thinking of investing should conduct their own due diligence.
