What is Password Hygiene? Password hygiene is the practice of selecting, managing and maintaining strong passwords to protect accounts and systems from cybercriminals. This includes, but is not limited to: Password creation – ensuring they are not obvious, common, or easy to hack.
Prioritize length and complexity, with a password that is at least 16 characters long and uses a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters. Consider a passphrase, which employs length and complexity while being easier to remember.
Bad password hygiene is responsible for countless data breaches and individual account takeovers, and security administrators routinely invest time and effort to educate users about bad password hygiene and its consequences.
Using the same password on multiple websites, or cycling between a handful of passwords. Using all lowercase letters (mixing lowercase and capital letters makes it harder to guess) Storing passwords in memory, on paper, or anywhere else they could be easily lost and/or stolen.
Poor password selection
A common and lazy habit of people who do not take cybersecurity seriously, recorded examples of bad choices include “qwerty”, “123456”, “admin”, along with the word “password”.
Good passwords are made up of a few key components including randomness, complexity and length. If your password is predictable, simple and or/short, chances are it is less secure. A combination of random letters, numbers and characters will be less likely to be hacked into.
wash your hands often with soap and water or alcohol-based hand sanitisers. avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth. clean and disinfect surfaces you use often such as benchtops, desks and doorknobs. clean and disinfect objects you use often such as mobile phones, keys, wallets and work passes.
Examples of good cyber hygiene include: Instituting a policy of regularly changing passwords to increase security. Configuring firewalls to prohibit outside entities from accessing data resources. Encrypting data at all stages to maintain its privacy in the event of data loss.
The key aspects of a strong password are length (the longer the better); a mix of letters (upper and lower case), numbers, and symbols, no ties to your personal information, and no dictionary words.
Do use at least eight characters of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols in your password. Remember, the more the merrier.
Use long, complex passwords that use spaces, capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. To make them easier to remember, consider using a sentence that has meaning to you.
Most hackable passwords
Second came “123456” followed by the slightly longer “123456789.” Rounding out the top five were “guest” and “qwerty.” Most of those log-ins can be cracked in less than a second.
Mix Word and number together randomly
Mix Word and number together randomly (mix uppercase and lowercase). For example, 2 words “Scotfield” and “01255447689”, mix it randomly and become “S012cot5544fie76ld89”, frankly… i do not think is it possible to crack, but it very hard to remember also.
A strong password is: At least 12 characters long but 14 or more is better. A combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Not a word that can be found in a dictionary or the name of a person, character, product, or organization.