What should be your password which can protect you online?

So why, if everything we use demands one, are we all so terrible at password discipline? And why don’t more companies have password management measures in place?

Regularly, surveys and reports suggest that too many people use the same usernames and passwords for virtually everything we access, from our eBay accounts, to our corporate invoicing and financing accounts, and from dating websites, to customer databases.

Indeed, other surveys reveal too many of us still use “password”, our children’s names, or family pet name as a password. A colleague, just last week, was at a local business that used “ABCDE12345” as its wifi password. Not good practices.

It is a cybercriminal’s dream-come-true. He or she knows that if only one password is cracked, a whole other world of opportunities opens up, even within strongly defended business networks.

Employees who have reused corporate emails and passwords for personal use can put their employers at risk of account takeovers, credential stuffing and extortion attempts.

The thing is, it is all so unnecessary with freely available password vaults that encrypt and protect both password and usernames from hackers. Two- and three-factor authentication that requires not only a password and username, but also something that only that user has on them, e.g. a piece of information only they should know or have immediately on hand - such as a physical token or mobile phone authentication application.

Using a username and password together with a piece of information that only the user knows makes it harder for potential intruders to gain access and steal that person’s personal data or identity.

We are in the business of making it as tough as we can for the attackers, and to do that we must learn to manage our password and usernames in a professional and responsible manner.