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
Just select ‘Options’ on the top menu, then ‘Login’ on the left hand side to get to
the form to change your password.