9 Tips for Creating a Secure Password

Creating a secure password means making any attempt to attack your data and the data of the company where you work as difficult as possible. Adopting good practices in creating strong personal passwords is halfway to protecting the corporate networks where it operates.

Cybersecurity companies say that at the weakest point of a corporate security system, however sophisticated, is always a user who is careless with their passwords and the way they use them online.

As complex as the system is, if there is a user who accesses personal content using weak passwords, this could be the gateway hackers are looking for.

We know that it is almost impossible to make passwords 100% secure, but we also know that it is possible, following some of the suggestions that we leave you here, to create a password that reaches a security level of 99.9%. Now try it.

How to Create a Secure Password

1. Do Not Use Dates or Names

Names of family or friends, boyfriends or spouses, pets or places meaningful to you are words to avoid. The same for important dates in your life, such as birth, wedding, first trip, or awards received.

All of these words or numbers will make your password insecure. With social networks in full swing and with its users, purposefully or not, exposing important information about their professional and private life, everything can be known.

For someone who is a specialist in crossing information, reaching a password of this type is increasingly easy.

2. Use at Least 8 Different Characters

The longer the passwords are, the more difficult they are to crack. You must use upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols (for example! Or *), you must not repeat letters or numbers, nor alphabetic, numeric, or keyboard sequences (for example, you should avoid: BBB, 888 or qwerty).

Security experts say it can help to separate words with symbols or replace some letters of the original words with numbers. This is a trick to take into account to create a secure password.

3. On the Same Computer, but With Different Passwords

Do not disclose, do not share, and do not write passwords "in a safe place" to keep in mind, are old advice, but they always work.

This is particularly important when there are people using the same computer, whether at home with family members or in a company with co-workers. The computer can be the same, but the access account must be different.

It is best to create an area for each one to access with their credentials. This will greatly reduce the risk to which the computer will be exposed, better protecting the data of each one.

4. For Each Service Use a Password

The reason is simple. Not using the same password for all the services you use means that, if a hacker finds your password for accessing the email, you do not have access to your home banking account or to your restricted area on the local network. your company.

The ideal is to always have a unique password for each service, especially if they are services related to banks or sensitive personal data, such as your medical data.

5. Create Mnemonics With “Passwords”

As you can see, creating a secure password, having multiple passwords, longer and with many different characters, can take a lot of your memory capacity.

Experts advise creating passwords using a mnemonic, a kind of memory aid that will help us remember our password almost automatically.

In this case, it works particularly well to use a sentence and not just a word. That phrase can be better memorized in your mind because it can follow the rhyme of a song you like or even a sequence of your habits upon waking up. Everything serves as long as you maintain the degree of difficulty and your ability to memorize the final result.

6. Use the Diceware Technique

If you want to go further and create a passphrase with the maximum possible security, you can use a technique very similar to encryption called Diceware.

The creator was the American mathematician Arnold Reinhold, who in 1995 developed the method using statistical concepts of randomness. The goal is to make your sentence completely random so that no one can relate to you and that it takes so long to decipher that no one gets on with it.

Just use a dice, roll it 5 times and point to the sequence of numbers that came out. Then just find, in the original list of words created by the author of the method, what was the word that came to you and repeats everything again to add more words to the first, forming a sentence.

7. Change Passwords Periodically

You followed all our advice and created your strong passwords and now… you have to do it all over again! What may seem like a real bummer is another way to keep your passwords secure at all times.

Imagine that you entered a server whose security was already compromised by a hacker who can capture your password without having to guess it. Even if you are not going to use it soon, you may not be interested in it, it will be compromised because someone else you don't know has access to it. But if you change it regularly it will greatly minimize the chances of that hacker wanting to exploit it later because, when he decides to do so, it may no longer exist.

8. Password Manager

Maybe all of this is too much work for you, or maybe you don't want to be constantly remembering countless different passwords. In this case, our advice is to use password management software that does the job for you.

There are many options available online and some with free versions. This software can generate passwords at random, allow the synchronization of passwords between different devices (including at work), allow self-filling options, and launch warnings for repeated password usage or when it is time to change your password again. pass.

All this having to memorize a single password: the one that allows access to this application. We leave you here with some of the most popular password management applications of the moment: KeePassX, LastPass, and Dashlane.

9. Create a Password Management Policy Within the Company

As you have already noticed, the passwords of employees of a company are considered the first bastion of defense against hacker invasions. So it is important to know how to create a secure password for each service used by each employee.

It is important for all employees to realize that, as for their personal information, they are also responsible for defending the communication networks of the companies where they work.

It is essential to define an effective policy on the internal management of passwords and that policy must be very clear in an official company document that must be known to everyone.

This document should inform how passwords should be created, used, stored, and how often they should be changed. It is also important to write down how to act if the user detects that one of his passwords has been compromised so that no employee hides the situation. Only in this way is it guaranteed that protection and damage containment actions can be taken in a timely manner.

We leave you here a model with the main themes that this document should focus on:

• All computers must have a password;

• Explanation of how passwords should be created. Use our advice and, if many passwords are required per user, choose a password manager for employees to use;

• Different passwords for different internal departments;

• Personal passwords differ from business passwords.

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