Good Password Rules
One of the basic fundamentals of good internet practice is securing your email accounts, financial accounts, social media accounts, and technology accounts with a great password. But with a lot of misinformation and perpetual bad practice surround passwords, I wanted to do a video & blog post where we go over generally good password rules for keeping all of your accounts safe.
If you are even a bit internet savvy, then you already know the traditional routes to creating secure passwords. Most websites take the guesswork out of the equation and create the rules for you. Most websites and apps are going to require the following for a good password: eight characters, combination of at least 1 uppercase and lowercase letter, a combination of at least one number and one letter, and a special character such as $, #, or !. You already most likely have a go-to password that you use for this combo. The better question is who came up with this rule?
I can’t be exactly sure who the person or organization is who creates safe password rules. However, it has become evident over the last year that there are other ways to create good passwords. For instance, a 25 character passphrase made up of 4 or more words will take equally as long as a time to crack as the traditional password template. What makes a passphrase preferable is that a personal phrase will be much easier to remember than a complicated password made up in an unmemorable way.
Don’t Memorize This List of Good Password Rules
Okay so maybe you are wondering why I would tell you not to memorize our list of good password rules you can watch in our attached video. The reason why I tell you that is because we will not be using traditional passwords for much longer. As fast as technology is changing and discoveries are being made about protection and security, there are much better ways to securing our accounts. Of course, hackers will continue to adjust. But the more complicated, and yet convenient, we can make logging into our accounts then the more frustrated hackers will become.
If you have an iPhone X then you have already encountered the facial recognition feature that it has. This is a cool feature that allows only your face to unlock your phone. If you have used previous versions of the iPhone then you have used your thumbprint to open your phone. This is an extremely convenient and yet hard to crack method. Our devices are becoming harder and harder to access if they are stolen… which of course makes stealing a device pointless. It will not be much longer before technology advances to the point where anyone who steals one of these devices will get caught. That fact alone will act as a deterrent to theft.
Another way passwords are changing is with 2FA. 2FA stands for 2 Factor Authentication. If you are unfamiliar with that, then check out our video about the app, Authy. The way 2FA works is by delivering a 6-9 digit code to your mobile device that is time sensitive. You have 30 seconds to type in the password or your device explodes… Okay, just kidding about the explosion. Every 30 seconds, the code resets. This makes your accounts almost impossible to break in to.
Please don’t forget to watch our video for good password rules & thanks for watching!
