Tip of the Week: Coming Up with Complex Passwords Doesn’t Need to Be Complex

With more scams out there than ever before, cybersecurity has never been more important than it is today. Scammers will take any opportunity to attack your employees and attempt to infiltrate your company’s password-protected accounts. Today we would like to share with you some great tips to keep your passwords strong and safe so they can best serve your company.

How You Can Make a Secure Password

Here are four ways you can keep your passwords safe and secure:

• Use complex strings of characters: Make sure your passwords use a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.
• The longer the password, the better: More characters make for more complex passwords that are harder to guess.
• Use passphrases instead: Passphrases are basically more complicated passwords that are easier to remember, but difficult to guess. You should use multiple words that don’t have anything to do with each other.
• Use different passwords for each account: Finally, make sure your passwords are unique so that one stolen password doesn’t completely put all of your accounts at risk.

These practices should help you keep more complex and secure passwords, but there are other opportunities to improve security, too.

How to Make the Most of Password Security

If you want to make the most of your password security measures, then we recommend you implement additional measures, like multi-factor authentication and password management solutions.

Multi-factor authentication is a powerful tool that works wonders alongside password security policies. MFA allows you to add additional measures to protect your accounts that augment and reinforce your passwords. A good MFA system will utilize two of the three security methods: something you are (biometrics), something you have (smartphone, USB keys), and something you know (a password, PIN, or passphrase).

Password management also gives you the opportunity to apply password practices on a grand scale. The password manager will securely store your passwords and provide them to the sites and applications that need them when requested. It makes using complex passwords even easier—especially with the built-in password generator.

Want to make the most of your passwords? BNMC can help! To learn more, call us at (978) 482-2020.