Posted by - February 01, 2023

It’s National Change Your Password Day, so it’s a great time for a refresher on creating good passwords and why you should use a secure password manager. These steps are easy to follow and don’t take much time but are essential to keeping your personal information safe on the internet.

Best Password Practices

  • Passwords should be a minimum of 8 characters
  • You should use a mixture of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols
  • Refrain from spelling any dictionary words
  • Enable multifactor authentication (MFA)
  • Never use the same password for more than one account
  • An example of an effective password would be: %PLxO23saX2#q

For a lot of people, this might seem very difficult to do when you have so many accounts.   That is why we recommend the use of a password manager. If you aren’t familiar, password managers record your log-in information when first signing into a website, and then auto-fill the information on subsequent visits. This allows for all your accounts to have different passwords without having to remember each specific one. Password managers can even auto-generate strong passwords for you.

Many password managers keep your master password locally and not on a remote server, protecting your account in the event of a data breach. Even the best password managers have vulnerabilities and can be hacked, but quality managers are based on zero-trust security. This means that all your passwords are encrypted at the device level, and not accessible to the password manager itself or any outside parties. However, if someone did get access to your master password, they could access your vault. This is why using multifactor authentication is still vital.

Creating strong passwords, enabling multifactor authentication, and using a password manager are all great and easy ways to keep your personal information secure in 2023. If you have any questions about password managers or IT in general, feel free to reach out to us at info@optfinity.com.

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