At this point, you may wonder why you need a strong password, in the first place. Even if most websites are safe, there is still a danger that someone will try to access or exploit your information. A strong password is among the most effective ways to protect your accounts and personal information from hackers. You should follow certain rules and guidelines while creating a strong password. Password managers are also recommended to help remember the created passwords for convenience of usage.
Now, you will start learning about the importance of creating a strong password for your user accounts in today's day and age.
Why Are Strong Passwords Needed?
Many individuals opt to tie their websites to something they can readily recall to generate easy, memorable combos. However, this does not make the password unique; in fact, the reverse is true. Passwords are handled by 53 percent of individuals using their recollections.
Image Courtesy: HiveSystems and howsecureismypassword.net
With modern computational standards, simple passwords take seconds and a couple of minutes at worst to be completely brute-forced. According to global surveys, more than 60% of people use the same passwords for their personal and job applications. While this may allow the user never to forget the password, it makes a single point of failure the only pin to drop. If one of the accounts gets breached, all subsequent accounts are as good as hacked.
To further elaborate on how you can create strong passwords, go through some of the guidelines.
Guidelines on Creating a Strong Password
Now, go through some DOs and DONTs to understand how to create new passwords for your accounts.
Dos
- A minimum of 12 characters —the more combinations, the better.
- A combination of upper and lower case letters.
- A combination of letters and numerals.
- Include at minimum one special character, such as! @ #?].
Dont's
- Any term in any language that can be discovered in a dictionary (e.g., airplane).
- A dictionary term in which certain letters have been substituted by numerals (e.g., a1rplan3).
- A recurring character or a set of characters (e.g., BBBBB or 12345).
- A set of characters on a keyboard (e.g., qwerty or zxcvb).
- Information about you (e.g., birthdays, addresses).
Now that you understand how to create strong passwords, look at how passphrases have become prevalent as a replacement for plaintext passwords.
Using Passphrases Instead of Passwords
A passphrase is lengthier than a password and can include spaces between words, as in "The morning coffee is wonderfully refreshing." A passphrase can also include symbols and does not need to be a whole sentence or grammatically accurate. The distinction between the two is that passwords normally do not contain spaces, but passphrases have spaces and therefore are longer than any arbitrary string of letters.
Passphrases have the following advantages:
- Passphrases are simpler to remember than just a random assortment of symbols and characters. It'd be easier to comprehend a line from your favorite song or a quotation than a short but difficult password.
- Passwords are reasonably easy for humans and robots to guess or crack. Online thieves have also advanced and created cutting-edge hacking tools to crack even the most complex passwords.
- Complies with password setting rules with ease. The usage of punctuation and upper and lower case passwords satisfies the password complexity criteria.
- Most operating systems and apps support passphrases. Phrases of up to 127 characters are permitted on all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac. As a result, for optimal protection, you can use lengthier passcodes.
- Passwords are nearly hard to crack since most efficient password cracking programs fail at approximately ten characters. As a result, even the most sophisticated cracking tool will be unable to guess, brute-force, or pre-compute these passwords.
But when creating a strong password, the major problem people come across is remembering these passwords or phrases. This is where you can find a use for a password manager.
How to Create Strong Passwords Using a Password Manager?
When you establish accounts or change passwords, password managers generate new strong passwords, and they keep all of your passwords in one place, protected by a single solid master password. If you maintain your master password, the password manager will retain everything else, including your username and password, and fill them in for you whenever you sign in to a website or app on your computer or phone. In the image below, you can find some of the recommended password managers:
Some benefits of using password managers are-
- No Good Memory Needed - This implies that everyone may use the most recent suggestions for strong passwords, such as extended phrases, symbols, grammar, and capitalization.
- Quick Access - Password managers enable consumers to write a single password and automatically fill each website with a username and password.
- Not Just Passwords - Credit card information may be stored securely with several password managers. Some others make multi-factor authentication or use a second test, such as answering a question once the correct password is input, a simple and effective solution to verify legitimate login attempts.
With this, you have come to the end of this tutorial on how to create a strong password.
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Conclusion
In this tutorial on how to create a strong password, you went over the need for having unique and difficult-to-break passwords. You covered some guidelines to be followed when creating new passwords, looked at some benefits of using passphrases instead of passwords, and the necessity of password managers today. However, password management is just a small part of keeping data safe on the internet.
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Do you have any doubts or queries on how to create a strong password? Please leave your questions and doubts in the comments box below, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
