Best Practices for Passwords

At RenovoData, we care about our customers, especially keeping their data safe and protected.

We work tirelessly to ensure that crucial business data is backed up and recoverable in the event of a disaster or data loss event. We stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the latest developments and trends in cloud computing. Still, in this day and age it does come as a bit of a surprise that some people are using weak passwords like “password” or “123456”! Most people know that the more common or weak a password, the higher the chances someone could hack into personal accounts… and yet, these weak passwords continue to be used A LOT.

Recently SplashData released its annual list of the year’s worst passwords. Among the top-ranked terrible passwords were: “qwerty”, “baseball”, and “football”. Numerical sequences also dominated the list including “111111” and “123123”. Changing things up are “abc123” and (somewhat ironically) “trustno1”.

In order to help you make your passwords more secure, we’ve gathered a few tips and suggestions:

• Don’t use the same password for all of your accounts.
• Don’t skimp on the character count. Unless otherwise directed, passwords should be at least 14 characters long.
• Avoid words with personal information, for example, your name, your pet’s name, your child’s name, the name of your favorite sports team, etc. This kind of information can be relatively easy to find and in turn, guessed.
• Scatter numbers and symbols throughout your password. Having them at the end or replacing an E with a 3 is just not secure enough.
• Pick random word combinations (like cheese-shoe-rain).
• Pick the first letter of each word in a sentence from a poem or song. (For example, “Let it go, let it go, Can’t hold it back anymore” would translate to “l-i-g-l-i-g-c-h-i-b-a”)
• Use a random password generator. (Example: http://passwordsgenerator.net/)
• We hope this post will get you thinking about the security of your passwords. Forgetting a password is a pain, but dealing with the aftermath of unauthorized access is much worse. Protect yourself!