Most people want to simplify their life and not have to remember dozens of different passwords. It’s very tempting to re-use the same password for multiple accounts. Most services have a requirement for “strong” passwords, consisting of letters, capitals, numbers, and sometimes even so-called special characters. Who’s got time to remember all that?
It may be tempting to use a common word (such as pet’s name), and then add a number or a special character and call it a day…
And once you come up with something you consider a “strong password”, you may want to re-use it on other websites, sometimes with slight variations… Don’t do it!
Data breaches happen all the time, even with well-known services. If hackers get a hold of your password, they can try to hack other services with the same login and password. Imagine if you only had one key that opens your house, car, storage unit, holiday home and safe deposit box…
Because many people use the same password everywhere, it will be much easier to hack other accounts as well. Crooks have automated software that tries to brute-force attempts to login. All it takes for them to be successful is knowing one of your compromised passwords…
In addition to using different passwords for all of your accounts, there are other ways to secure them from attacks, such as multi-factor authentication. Banks do it all the time, asking you to type a one-time code sent to your account to validate that it is actually you who is trying to login, and not some guy in a foreign country who happened to guess or know your password.
We will talk about it in more detail in our next newsletter, in addition to giving you tips on how to use unique passwords without having to memorize them. Stay tuned!
And for some humor, watch this!
