Are your email and website passwords strong enough?

Strong passwords are essential to security

The most common way that websites and email accounts get compromised is through having a weak password. Powerful computer programs can attempt tens of thousands of different password combinations for your account until the correct one is found, generally dictionary words take seconds to check even when multiple words are combined.

What makes a good strong password?

Several factors for creating a strong password:

1. Password Length
2. Password Complexity
3. How memorable is the password

1. Password Length
Good passwords should be at least a minimum of 8 characters long. Essentially, the longer the password the longer it will take for a computer to crack as there are more possible combinations of characters. A very simple 8 character password containing just lowercase letters has nearly 209 billion possible combinations. That may sound a lot but unfortunately this still does not take long to crack using a computer program.

2. Password Complexity
Stronger passwords will contain more than just lower case letters. They will also contain a combination of uppercase & lowercase letters, numbers and at least one special character (a hyphen, exclamation point, hash, etc.). All passwords are case-sensitive, so using upper & lower case letters makes it much more difficult to crack.

3. Making it Memorable
A strong password is all very well and good provided that you can remember it. A good way to remember a complicated password is to write a phrase or short sentence and then change the case of letters, substitute numbers and add special characters so that you can still read it but a computer would find difficult to crack.

wAter_i5coo!iN-the5umMer#

For example, you could use wAter_i5coo!iN-the5umMer# as your secure password. You can still see that it says “water is cool in the summber”, but that password is going to be much, much harder to crack than just using “wateriscoolinthesummber“.

I can’t remember all my passwords?

It is always good practice to have a different password for each website and email accounts, but this can become difficult to remember.

Using a password manager
There are many password managers that you can use which stores all of your passwords in a database on your computer. Each time you go to a website, it can auto fill your login information for you. Good password managers will allow your passwords to sync between your desktop computer as well as your mobile devices.

Your web browser also has the capability to store your passwords, although this is not very secure, as clearing your browsers cache will result in losing your passwords.

Update your Webnetism email password now

Now you know how to protect yourself take a few minutes to login and change your password using the webmail access at https://webmail.webnetism.com