Do you have good password hygiene? Good password hygiene helps keep your work and personal information safe.
You have healthy password hygiene if you:
- Create strong passwords by establishing passwords minimally 8 characters in length and containing upper case, lower case, and symbols. A password of more than 8 characters is even better because more guesses will be needed by hackers to get it right. Even with frequent warnings regarding cyber security, the two most common passwords people use are “password” and “12345678”!
- Use a different password for every account or online profile. Should the system you are using be compromised that password could be published for the world to see. There are almost 2.7 billion rows of data in the “Have I Been Pwned?” website of account information that has been compromised in data breaches. This is a respected site that aggregates data breaches in order to make it easy for people to find out if they have been impacted by a breach. You can check it yourself by going to https://haveibeenpwned.com.
- Use two-factor authentication (2FA) whenever available. This requires a second code be entered that will be provided through text, email or token in addition to your User ID and Password.
- Never write down your User ID or password and particularly never write it down and post it to your computer.
Maintain healthy security by maintaining healthy password hygiene.
