Strong Password Practices To Secure Your Online Banking

Passwords have been around since the ancient times. Secrets were exchanged and given to others as proof they should be trusted. And, they’re still the fundamental mechanism to prevent access you’re important accounts.

While passwords been around centuries, technology has certainly changed how they work. Threats to your password are everywhere, from your local administrator, to the far reaches of the internet. This has lead to many changes to the spoken secrets used in medieval times. They are now transfered from your keyboard to websites using complicated encryption algorythms to keep them safe from internet evesdroppers. They’re stored by indecipherable hashes to keep people with access to the servers from seeing them.

Unfortunately, the way people create passwords hasn’t kept up with technology. People tend to stick with things they can remember, and use them far too long. Not only that, they often use them across multiple accounts. These practices leave your accounts vulnerable to attackers who exploit these habits.

The good news is you can use secure password practices to not only make your passwords harder to crack, but keep you’re accounts safer, too. Let’s take a look at things you should consider when choosing a strong password.

1. Length Matters

When choosing a password, longer is better. Think 12 characters or more. Strong passwords protect against brute force guessing, and more characters means more combonations to try. While trying trillions and trillions of password combonations against your accounts login page would never work, hackers break in and steal the database with all the users accounts and passwords. Once they have that, they can guess all the combonations offline much faster than online. To see if any of your accounts have been involved in a data breach, go to https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Lots of letters alone don’t make the strongest passwords. You’ve got to add a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special symbols, too. By simply adding more TYPES of characters, you exponentially increase the number of possibilities an attacker must try in order to guess your password. That means much more time to get to your password, hopefully causing an attacker to give up before guessing all combonations.

2. Don’t use your pets/kids name

It’s tempting to use familiar names or other information that’s easy to remember. But this generally doesn’t create a strong password. Your pet may have an unusual name, but it’s still not a good password (even if you replace the o’s with 0’s). Also, when using familiar information, it’s tempting to reuse the password across accounts. Imagine someone cracks your password from a site with poor security. Once they have a valid username and password, they can start trying all the banking sites, credit card sites, shopping sites, and all other high value sites. If you’ve used the same email and password and any of those, they’re now vulnerable as well. Hackers have tools to automate the search, so it’s a lot easier than you think.

Word lists and dictionary attacks exist to take advantage of people’s desire to make their passwords personal and easy to remember. Avoiding names and words by using random characters protects you against these types of attacks.

3. Other techniques for remembering strong passwords

When chosing a strong password, there are some tricks to make it easier to remember. For instance, keyboard patterns and modified phrases can be used to keep the trickiest passords at your fingertips. For example only! QwErTy!2#4%6 is an obvious keyboard pattern. Move around to increase the complexity. A better example is :LKJgh*680

Just remember, when using patterns or phrases, mix it up so it’s still difficult to guess.

4. Strong Password Management

Even with the techniques above, you might still be temped to write them down. They even sell special books to log your passwords, but using them is a bad idea. Whatever you use to write your passwords on can easily be lost, or stolen. You may not even know someone has seen it until it’s too late.

Password Managers solve the issue of remembering your passwords without writing them down. All you’re passwords are stored in an encrypted vault so they’re safe should someone copy it. They can also create long and complex passwords, and even automatically fill in the right username and password for the web site you’re on. So, you can easily have a completely random 25 character password, don’t need to remember it, and don’t even need to type it. Some even allow accessing your passwords across devices.

Of course, your password vault is protected with a… password. So, you’ll need to follow all these recommendations, and memorize at least one! Password managers may have a bit of a learning curve. But it pays off big not only for security, but also convenience! Find out all about using password managers.

Conclusion

So, I hope you have a better understanding as to why it’s important to have strong passwords and how to create them. Always use combonations of lower case, upper case, numbers, and symbols, and keep you’re passwords to at least 12 characters long. Never use names or words found in dictionaries. The best advice is to use a good password manager such as BitWarden, LastPass, or 1Password to not only create strong passwords, but also securely store them for you.