Creating a password that is strong is essential to protect accounts on the Internet. It is the main barrier that will prevent intruders and have problems. Now, many times we make mistakes that can cause us to be totally unprotected. We are going to explain what is the biggest mistake when creating a password and what leaves our accounts without adequate protection.
Reuse a password, the biggest mistake possible
Surely on some occasion you have registered on a page, Internet forum, social network or whatever and you have used a password that you already had on another site. This is usual for convenience, to be able to remember them better. However, it is the biggest mistake we can make.
What can happen? Let’s think that we are using a password that is very good, that complies with all the essentials, in a social network such as Facebook and also in an Internet forum where we have registered to solve an error with a camera that we have. After a while that forum, which we have not returned to, has a problem and all user data is filtered.
This will mean that a possible attacker who has access to this data will be able to enter our account by using the password and the information that has been leaked. The normal thing is that we have the same email linked as in the Facebook account, which also has the same password . Therefore, that attacker could try to enter the social network with the same password.
As we can see, what is known as the domino effect occurs. Basically a vulnerability or leak appears somewhere, in this case it would be that forum, and it affects other accounts in which we are using the same password.
Therefore, we can say that the biggest possible mistake when creating a password is precisely using the same key on several sites at the same time. And it should be mentioned that it does not matter what it is. It does not matter if it is a social network known as Facebook or Twitter or we talk about any page or forum.
Random, unique and complex passwords
So what does a good password have to look like? We have seen that the most serious mistake is to use the same key in several places. Therefore, in order to have truly secure passwords, the first thing to keep in mind is that they must be unique . We have to create one for email, another for Facebook, another for that cloud account we have, etc. So with every record we make.
But in addition, the key must be totally random . This means that we must avoid putting things like our name, date of birth or any word or digit that can be predicted. In case an attacker tries to steal the key by some method such as breaking it by brute force, the first thing he will use are combinations with this type of words and data.
Beyond those two basic points, the third would be to create a really complex key. This means that it must contain a little of everything to be strong. What does this mean? Ideally, it should have letters (both uppercase and lowercase), numbers and also other special symbols that we sometimes forget about them but that will undoubtedly make a password much stronger. There are options like creating strong keys with HashPass.
An example of a really safe password that can protect us would be 3Diu $ -% fH (9W2 . As we can see, it is totally random and has a mixture of digits, letters and symbols. Ideally, the ideal would be to have a password of that type for each one of accounts on the Internet We can always rely on password managers so as not to forget them.
