World Password Day 2024

World Password Day falls on the first Thursday of May every year and serves as a reminder to check your password hygiene. Cyber crime is constantly evolving and becoming increasingly sophisticated, so it’s important that we all try to stay ahead of the hackers – creating complex, unique passwords is a fundamental way of doing that. In this article, we’ll take you through password mistakes to avoid, how to make a strong password, and how a password manager like TFSsecure:password will make you confident, productive, and even more secure.

Mistakes to avoid when making a password

Weak passwords make individuals and businesses vulnerable to attack. Passwords are often the first (and in some cases only) barrier between a hacker and your data – make sure they’re strong!

Here are some common features of weak passwords that should be avoided:

Too short

Passwords should be pretty long—it takes an incredible amount of time to compromise a 16-digit password compared to a 6-digit one. This is arguably the main factor in determining password strength. See the chart further down to see how long a password of each length and complexity takes to compromise and remind yourself of this when creating new accounts or changing your password.

Personal identifying information

Passwords including pet names, your favourite football team, your date of birth, or similar information are easy for hackers to guess. The primary way that hackers do this is through social engineering. First, they identify you as a target, then build a file on you using platforms like your social media to see what and who you engage with to gauge your interests and then attempt to compromise your account. Sound scary? It is! Don’t give them any material that could indicate your password, and be sensible about what you put online and who can see it.

Common phrases or sequences

You would be surprised (or perhaps not) at how many people use the word “password” in their passwords or use sequential patterns like “12345” or “abcdef”. These should never be used in any form within any of your passwords. If one of your accounts gets compromised with a password like this, you’re labelling yourself as an easy target and somebody who doesn’t care about cyber security. It won’t be long until that hacker who compromised your email account tries to access your bank account, too.

Repeated passwords

Even if your password is difficult to guess, having the same password across multiple accounts is a big no-no – if one of those accounts is compromised in a data breach, cyber criminals will have access to tens or hundreds of your other accounts that use the same password. Keep it unique!

How to create a strong password

Strong passwords give you peace of mind and allow you to be productive with less fear of your account being compromised. Keeping your passwords safe is about having a security first mindset – whilst it may be a little less convenient to have a complex password than an easy one you remember, it’s far more secure and reduces the chance of you having to recover your account at a later date.

Here are some good habits you should adopt when you create or update your passwords:

Make it long

The safest passwords are 16 digits or longer, as you can see from the table above. Many websites make you choose a password that’s 6 digits or longer, but this can be cracked almost instantly. Always pick a long password.

Use a mix of characters

You can also see this in the table above – whilst a password of all lowercase letters of 16 characters is quite secure on paper, by adding in the odd symbol, number, and uppercase letter, the strength of a password is improved drastically.

Ensure it's unique

This comes as no surprise based on the list above about weak passwords, but it’s worth reiterating – make sure each password you create is completely unique and not copied or only slightly altered from your others. If a cyber criminal gets into one account, don’t give them access to all your others at the same time!

There are many different methods of creating a strong password, but all of them will have the above features in common. You can use techniques like “three random words” to create a strong password. For example, the World Password Day website uses the example FriendsHippoMaze as three random words and makes it even stronger by including special characters and numbers, leaving you with Fr1endsH!pp0M@ze.

Another method, and a favourite of mine, is to make your passwords complete and utter gibberish! They’re very hard to remember, but they’re very hard to crack. The key factor here is that you save these in a password manager rather than trying to remember them – do not be tempted to write them down physically or save them in your notes, or else you’ve just undone all of your hard work! Lock them behind a password manager with a single, secure password you do remember and which you change often, and always add MFA to ensure extra security.

Keep your passwords safe with TFSsecure:password

You need a password manager to create the safest, strongest passwords possible. Creating and remembering hundreds or thousands of passwords without the help of a password manager would be quite the feat, and not having a password manager leads to bad password habits – reusing the same password, making them easy to remember, and keeping them short.

TFSsecure:password takes all of the guesswork out of passwords, allowing you to create complex, unique passwords, save them in specific folders, add another layer of security with MFA within the software, and even allows you to save other private personal information such as credit card info, passport details, and more. Whilst we offer TFSsecure:password to our clients for business use, every single user also gets a free personal account to use outside of work, allowing you to maintain good password hygiene in both your professional and personal life.

Password managers are a great investment for your security and peace of mind. It's important to set them up carefully and take advantage of their full set of features. TFSsecure:password helps keep you safe and productive with enterprise-level security both in and out of work. When it comes to passwords, don’t take chances – get in touch with us today to see how TFSsecure:password can help you succeed.