Start with your passwords
Did you know the top three most common passwords used are 123456, 12345 and password? OMG! Really? (sound of me now shaking my head) You make yourselves sitting ducks, with big red bullseyes, when you use these types of passwords.
The best way I found to create a strong password is to combine everything; (I mean everything). This is the one case were having a lot of ingredients helps. What I like to do is think of an era in my life that was important or a course I took in university that I liked. Then I use the letters of the course and add in the numbers from a different course.
Here’s an example
Let’s say I liked the course OPR725 and I also liked another course from another institution MATH3705. I would take OPR and add 3705 to it. Now I need a symbol so I will take a % and add my score in that class 85% so my password becomes OPR370585%. This is a pretty good password.
You can also decide to make the letters OPR a mix of lower and upper cases, for example, Opr370585%. To make this even better, let’s add the short form of both schools I went to at the end as a mixture of upper, lower cases and symbols to spell out the school in short form: Opr370585%$3N&C@. Can you guess the two schools? Probably not. Now I know what you are thinking. You think this is a long password, but you’ll remember how it was made so you won’t forget it.
A word of caution
Do not include your birthday or the actual name of the school or the year you graduated because, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms, any decent hacker already knows all that about you. My philosophy is, mind what you share and think like a hacker.
How long would it take someone to crack your password if they had all day to do so? How many permutations and combinations are needed to crack your password? The first line of defense in protecting your information is to create a challenging password.
Word to live by
I had a professor say, you don’t have to be the best when it comes to protecting your data, just be better than the next person. So, how can you protect your data in this crazy Wild West?
Make it hard so that they move on to the next victim.
By Adetola Oyegbola, Marketing Automation, Echoworx
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