How To Secure Is My Password: Complete Guide

Last Updated on 5 months by Touhid

How to secure is my password? If you’re curious about how to secure your password, then this post is absolutely for you. Password security will be the first line of protection against cyber hackers or unauthorized access. If you use a weak or simple password then your account may be compromised by an attacker.

What Is A Strong And Secure Password?

You can use whatever sequence you want while setting up your password but not all passwords are strong ones. A strong password is one that is challenging for other people to guess or crack. It needs to be formed from a number of different parts that all work together to make it incredibly secure.

Simple-to-remember passwords are often used, which lowers the security of users’ login information. Private information like the users’ names, phone numbers, birthdays, or even the notoriously insecure and wildly popular “password” itself are commonly included in these selections.

This practice significantly increases the likelihood of account hacking attempts since such passwords are simple to guess, putting users’ online security at serious risk.

When your password is compromised, your sensitive data like banking is in serious threat of being accessed by hackers. This increases the concerns of securing your password properly to save yourself from being hacked.

Your password for every account on the internet should be different so even if one of your passwords is hacked, the hacker won’t be able to access your other accounts.

There are many techniques to set up secure passwords. Today in this post, we will guide you on how to secure your password with everything you need to know. 

How To Secure is My Password?

Creating a secured password depends completely on how you want to create your password and how you wish to use different sequences of numbers, special characters, or words.

From research of our experts, we found some general guidelines that you can follow to create a password which will be extremely difficult to hack through.

1. Create A Strong Password

Create a strong password is the first tips on how to secure is my password for online accounts. You have to create a strong password with the combination of uppercase letters (A – Z), lowercase letters (a – z), numbers (0 – 9), and special characters (@, #, $, %, ^, (,), &, *!). The password length should be at least 10 characters long.

Example: Dm#a46^bd&$T is a strong password.

2. Avoid using personal information.

Never use your personal information in your password and this includes your name, phone number, date of birth, and stuff like this. Because this kind of information is frequently made available to the public, which makes it simpler for someone to figure out your password.

3. Make sure your password is long

Yes, you read it right, long passwords are super difficult to guess. For instance, if your password is four characters, then someone trying to guess your password will need to think of combinations of four only.

But when your password becomes 6-8 characters long the guessing combination also becomes hard to guess.

Experts advise using passwords that are at least 8 characters long since longer passwords are more challenging to crack. So, make sure that your password is long to secure your password.

4. Use passphrases

Attackers in the modern digital environment have access to strong tools that can swiftly crack passwords. Given the computing power at hand, choosing a password that is genuine words might leave you open to dictionary and brute force assaults.

So, It’s advised to create complicated passphrases by connecting together various words in order to increase the security of your password. These longer passwords are exceptionally resistant to dictionary-based assaults as well as conventional brute force techniques.

5. Enable multi-factor authentication

This is another important tip for how to secure my password. Just setting up a strong password is not enough to secure it, you should also enable multi-factor authentication and most accounts nowadays support this.

This adds a layer of extra security to your passwords. So, after you input your password it will ask for a second authentication like fingerprint, face ID, or sometimes an OTP-based text message which will be sent to your phone directly.

Thus, you can only access your account after you have successfully given your password along with second-factor authentication.

So, you have to turn on two-factor authentication into your account in order to secure your password. It also secures your system by protecting it against cyber threats such as phishing, brute-force attacks, and social engineering attacks.

6. Use password manager

Sometimes we make the mistake of writing our password somewhere so we don’t forget the password. But, this is quite risky as if someone mistakenly gets this file you are doomed.

The main solution to this issue is using password management tools, which can help you to secure your password. These tools are mostly paid and are highly secure, they store all your usernames and passwords for you in encrypted form. Do not worry even these tools cannot access or see your passwords, they just store them by encryption. 

Some of these tools even offer more features like suggesting strong passwords for different sites and even auto-filling them on certain websites. This saves you from the hassle of always writing your passwords and usernames.

The Best Password Managers of 2023 are as follows:

• LastPass
• Dashlane
• LogMeOnce
• Bitwarden
• RememBear
• 1Password
• Keeper

7. Never use the same password on all accounts

Refraining from using the same passwords across all of your accounts is another way to safeguard your security and passwords. You must use a different password for each of your accounts. 

Do not use the same password for many accounts since if a hacker is able to access one of your accounts, they will have easy access to all of your accounts quite easily.

So, how to secure my password for multiple accounts? Simple answer is use strong and unique password for every accounts.

For example:

• Email account -> Eg$5%2cv*tR
• Bank account –> Bn%6*8gh)eD
• Twitter account –> T@4+5df9*aL
• Facebook account –> F#t67%8gh)L

8. Frequently update your passwords

Frequently updating passwords is another important thing to keep in mind to secure your passwords. Do not keep on using the same old passwords for many years. Experts suggest updating your passwords at least once every 6 months.

Some Extra Tips To Secure Passwords

By now you should have a complete idea on how to create stronger passwords. However, these extra tips below will help you ensure that your passwords have an additional layer of security.

• Add a 17 characters long password if possible (minimum should be 8).
• Never use letters or numbers in sequence in passwords like 123, abc.
• You can use a passage from your favorite book as a password.
• Certain lines from the lyrics of a song can also act as a good and strong password.
• Change your passwords instantly if you access your accounts from any public computer.
• Avoid using public open Wi-Fi as hackers often use these networks as traps to hack into your account.

What Are The Importance Of Securing My Password

Our today’s world is highly dependent on the internet starting from personal life to professional life. A simple breach of this can lead to huge financial loss along with loss of sensitive data which makes it more than important to secure our password.

• Your passwords guard against unauthorized access to your emails, bank accounts, social media accounts, and other private and sensitive data.
• Hackers can break into your banking account if you don’t set a strong password and steal huge amounts of money.
• One of the key protection against online risks including hacking, phishing, and social engineering is the use of strong passwords
• Hackers can hack your online shopping accounts and order products for themselves on your behalf, strong passwords can protect you from this.
• Your business accounts become more vulnerable to cyber attacks if you do not use strong and secure passwords.

Examples: Data Breaches Caused Due To Weak Password

Previous section, we have discussed on how to secure is my password. Now, we’ll give some of the examples of how big companies suffered huge monetary as well as reputation loss by becoming victims of hacking.

#Example 1: Best Buy in 2017

Best Buy is one of the largest and most renowned companies around the world especially in the US and Canada. They were victims of a huge cyberattack back in 2017.

A hack on Best Buy’s computer infrastructure led to a compromise of their chatbots with malware. By using this technique, the attackers were able to steal a significant amount of client data from the company’s website.

#Example 2: Linkedin in 2021

The Linkedin also fell to a cyberattack by hackers back in 2021 and this was much bigger than Best Buy hacking. Hackers used scraping techniques to hack into the site’s API database to steal over 700 million customer information.

This caused a huge impact on the reputation of the company as this was nearly 90% of their total user information.

#Example 3: Sony in 2011

The hacking incident of Sony is probably one of the largest hacking incidents ever recorded. In 2011 Sony became a victim of a huge cyberattack.

Sony reportedly lost close to $171 million as a result of LulzSec shutting down its Playstation network. The breach, which compromised 77 million accounts, is still regarded as the biggest to ever strike the gaming industry.

#Example 4: Facebook in 2019

It will be difficult to find someone now who doesn’t use facebook and they have one of the most secure systems. Still they faced hacking back in 2019 and hackers exposed two datasets from them directly on the public internet.

This compromised personal information like email, phone number and stuff like this of over 530 million users worldwide.

FAQs

If you are not serious about securing your passwords then you can end up losing all of your sensitive data. Keep on reading our faqs below to have a better idea about stronger passwords.

How frequently should I change my passwords?

Passwords need to be changed frequently to have a more secure  account and experts suggest changing the passwords periodically at least once in every 6 months. However, make sure to set very unique passwords with a combination of words, letters and unique characters.

Are passphrases more secure than regular passwords?

Because they are long and simple to remember, passphrases are a good password substitute. They are extremely resilient to dictionary attacks, which frequently target shorter passwords containing widely used terms. Using a passphrase can significantly increase your online security.

What are the most common ways hackers hack your passwords?

Hackers can hack your passwords in many ways and the most common ways include data breaches, malware, dictionary and brute force assaults. If your password is easy, sometimes hackers can simply guess your password and hack into your account.

Are google passwords safe?

Google’s auto generated passwords are quite safe as they use a combination of numbers, characters and words (both in uppercase and lowercase). However, these passwords are 15 characters long which makes it even difficult for hackers to guess. 

Final Words

The most crucial and initial step in protecting yourself from hackers is to make sure that your passwords are safe. You need to create strong passwords that are capable of withstanding hacking attempts.

Regardless of how close a person is to you, never disclose your password with them. Additionally, avoid putting your password down anywhere on paper or in documents; instead, use a password manager tool.

This blog has suggested the best tips on how to secure is my password; hope these tips will be helpful to secure your password.