They Say that a Good Offense is a Good Defense: 4 Steps to a Good Password

When making a password it’s important to remember than you’ll never have a perfect one. All it takes is a committed hacker, time, and the right brute force tools and POOF, your password’s cracked! But if the protection is strong enough, it will take a hacker a lot longer to crack the code and oftentimes will become discouraged and quit before they ever actually hack your system.

So to help you arm yourself against these digital desperados, we’ve compiled these five steps.

1. Begin with a base word phrase: Do you have a stellar catchphrase that you’re always repeating? Or what about a memorable quote or saying that really resonates with you? They’ll come in handy in this stage. Choose a phrase that is easy for you to remember and take the first letter of each word. For example, the phrase “Strangers waiting up and down the boulevard” would translate into swuadtb.
   
2. Lengthen the Phrase: Alright, now that we have our base phrase, it’s time that we make that puppy strong. A password becomes more effective as its character length increases. Having a password that is at least 6 characters long is a good baseline to go by. So using our example from above, we can lengthen it by adding the website name that we are using it for or a company name: swuadtbGmail.
3. Swap in Non-alphabetic and Uppercase Characters: We’re going to continue to strengthen our sample password by adjusting the case of some of the letters within the password. By doing this, we make our password more unique and less predictable, even if a hacker is using dictionary database attacks. In this situation, our password could read as follows: Swu@DtbGm@iL.
4. Change Passwords Regularly: Okay, we’ve made a fairly safe password. Yay! But now what? A simple way to continually protect your network is to rotate through a string of passwords so that every weeks, you’re using a different password. This makes your network more resistant to brute force hacker attacks.

Following this guidelines won’t make your password 100% unbreakable but it will certainly help you build a strong wall defense against hackers. Think you can’t do it alone? Give the team here at Intelice a call and we’ll help you guard what matters most to you: your business.