What passwords do you use? Surely, like most users, you have chosen to use easy-to-remember passwords that are weak and that cybercriminals get without difficulty.
According to some studies, 90% of the passwords we use are vulnerable. For this reason, cybercriminals always turn to them as the first option when they want to take control of a user account.
What mistakes do we make when choosing our passwords?
- Recycling: it is one of the most frequent mistakes. We should not use the same password for different accounts.
- Leave them written and in view of everyone: it will be useless to use a robust password if you have it written and in view of everyone, on your desk.
- Use of number series or keyboard series: have you ever used the password “123456”? This is what we mean. But, also to those which follow the keyboard pattern: “asdfgh” “tyuiop”, etc.
- Use words like “password”,”admin”, “user”, etc. In fact, the word “password” always is in the top positions in the most used passwords of the year.
- Use phrases like “iloveyou”, “teodio”, “teamo”, etc.
- Use hobbies: in this case it may be the name of clothing brands, your team, your favorite music groups, etc.
It is best to use complex passwords, which are long (minimum 8 characters) and include numbers, capital letters, lower case letters and symbols. Never use words that appear in a dictionary.
To remember a complex password, you can use the “password phrases”: choose an easy phrase for you, change some letters to capitals, add symbols and, finally, you can replace letters by numbers that look like.
To avoid risks, the most advisable thing is to change your passwords regularly (every 60 or 90 days) and don’t reuse previous ones. Also, keep in mind that you must use a new password for each service or application.