How many times have you heard that you need to change your password or have a stronger password? First, to motivate the change, you need to understand why this is important. Let’s say you use the same email and password for multiple sites. If just one of those sites is hacked, cyber criminals will try to use that same email and password on other sites. If they happen to try a bank that you use, your account is at risk (see this week’s Vocabulary Word “Credential Stuffing Attack”).
So now that you are sufficiently motivated to change your password (hopefully), how can you remember all those passwords?
Some experts suggest a combination of upper/lower case letters, numbers, special characters and a minimum length. This can become cumbersome and difficult to remember.
One option is to use a phrase. A 15-letter password can be cracked in 15 hours. But a sentence like “SnowWhite&The7DwarvesFacebook” is a 29-letter password and easy to remember. Then to make it different for your Twitter, you could use “SnowWhite&The7DwarvesTwitter” and so on.
You can also choose to use a reputable password keeper on your computer or your smartphone.