Did You Know You Can Adopt Password Strategies To Improve Security?
Authored by David Carroll
Using current computing power, most passwords less than eight characters long can be brute-forced in less than a day. This includes passwords using upper, lower case and special characters.
In the next series of posts, we will cover how to create your own password management strategy. The posts aim to help you formulate a better method of managing your passwords, both within your pharmacy and at home. Some of the topics you may find too cumbersome or complex to do immediately. Still, we hope you take some ideas away and implement them when you can. It will significantly reduce your personal vulnerability when websites and services are breached, and your login details are made public.
Passwords – Here To Stay For a Little While Longer
For the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not, creating, remembering, and using passwords will be a fact of life. Without a password strategy, managing passwords can be stressful and seem like a real pain. Bad passwords are also risky, as it is human nature to take the easy way out and reuse a password you have used or create a password you know you will remember.
Unfortunately, these passwords are easy for threat actors to guess or are on the list of most commonly used passwords. The risk increases if you use the same password on many of your sites, allowing the threat actor to access your email, social media, and banking in one fell swoop.
The good news is that the creators of your favourite devices, Apple, Google, and Microsoft want to get rid of passwords. There is a plan to move away from website passwords and instead use your mobile device and biometrics such as your thumbprint or face-id.
A Password Strategy
The best way to improve anything in cybersecurity is to have a strategy to address the problem or risk. Define a goal and outline the steps to reach that goal.
At a high level, a password strategy looks something like this:
So, What Makes A Secure Password?
The best practice for creating secure passwords:
- A password should be long – 10 characters at a minimum, but ideally 20 or more characters.
- A password should include a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters. E.g.!@#$%^&*
- A password shouldn’t be shared with any other account. One password per website or application.
- A password shouldn’t include personal information such as an address, phone number, or any information that can be accessed on social media, like kids’ or pets’ names.
- A password shouldn’t contain any consecutive letters or numbers.
- A password shouldn’t have the word “password” or the same letter or number repeated.
The problem with adhering to the above rules is that if you create passwords like this for every account, you will struggle to remember them and write them down.
One of the best ways to create a secure password is not to use random letters, numbers, and characters but instead use a series of unrelated words joined together.
We recommend for creating your first super strong password, start by thinking about a series of unrelated words.
Next week, we will talk about the risks of reusing passwords and how threat actors can find out how you create passwords and then use that information to gain access to your accounts.
The week after, we will show you how to use your super secure password to move away from password reuse and create unique passwords for every site – and make it so you never need to know what those passwords are.
Finally, in the last week, we will talk about how you can start moving away from passwords in some technology areas and how you apply that to personal security.
If you are worried about the security of your pharmacy systems and want to know you can improve your pharmacy security, speak to your Corum Customer Success Manager or contact us on 1300 669 865.