What is a Secure Password?

What is a secure password?

Secure passwords are ones that don’t have any attachment to you at all, nowadays hackers can easily pay websites to give them all the personal information that you have put up on the internet over time. Think about it – anyone can find your Facebook page and find out your age, gender, where you live, where you have been. And although you might not have included your date of birth – criminals can easily work it out when you celebrate your ‘30th birthday today’ on social media.

Another way is once hackers find your email address, they can just paste that into Google and they will find all the accounts that have ever been set up with your email address.  All it takes is for you to use part of your real name and or other personal information in a password and criminals can use the data they have collected to guess your password.   Fraudsters store your data in a database which they can then use in a phone call so they seem more legit when they ring you and – if they can gain your trust – they can get into your bank account.

So, having a randomly generated password (created by a Password Manager program) can take you a step away from that.

Two factor authentication (2FA) is the most sophisticated type of encryption nowadays – it’s just a program called Authy which is free and you install it on your phone and/or computer.  All you need is a one master password (stored on a Password Manager like Dashlane) and from there it creates a random 6 digit number which changes every 30 seconds and you have to put that in within the time frame or you cannot get in. This is very hard for scammers to crack and most, if not all, websites now enable this.