Since it seems next to impossible to keep nasty hackers from making repeated attempts at gaining access to accounts of unsuspecting users, it is a safe bet for users to protect their own data by employing passwords which are not prone to being hacked easily. The question that now arises is whether it is humanly possible to construct such passwords that can survive several attempts at being cracked and still remain intact. It turns out the answer to this question is in the affirmative. Read on to find out how you can strengthen your password in order to raise your account’s security bar.
The Ideal Password
For starters, always remember that the ideal password that can potentially be hack-resistant would most likely be a complicated word. In fact, according to The Oatmeal, the ideal password looks as if it is the product of a cat’s long nap on the keyboard. However, this description obviously is not too realistic since a conundrum of random alphabets, digits, symbols and what not is humanly possible to remember.
According to Norton Security’s Marion Merritt, while it is important to avoid basic words, it is also essential that obvious combinations of letters are not used, such as combinations like “WERTY” or “QAZWSX” that just require you to go horizontally or diagonally on your keyboard. Though they are not proper words, they can easily be guessed by hackers who have access to details of breached data, indicating that such combinations are frequently used and thus can be speculated without much difficulty.
In order to create strong passwords, you can resort to many tricks with the most famous being putting together the first alphabet of each word from a sentence that you know. For example, you can use “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” to create the word “Tqbfjotld”. However, such brilliant passwords which cannot be found in any dictionary should not be reused over and over for several accounts as that undermines their uniqueness. The experts suggest the use of password manager like the Norton to have various unique passwords encrypted and stored away on cloud storage so that you can access them from any device when you need to use one of them.
The Most Important Password of All
Merritt further goes on to stress how the most important of all passwords is the one associated with your email since all accounts that a user maintains on other websites have a “forgot your password” option which users end up using quite frequently, since it is difficult to remember all the unique passwords that you put in place for various accounts. Thus, it becomes increasingly important to have the most complex password guarding your email because having your email hacked means that the notorious invader can access each one of your accounts linked to your email through the “forgot your password” feature. Also, it is important not to reuse your email’s password – regardless of how strong and unique it may be – for other accounts as that would put your email account in jeopardy if one of the other accounts ends up getting hacked.
