Tips For Keeping Your Accounts Secure

In today's digital world, strong passwords are your first line of defense. This guide offers practical tips, from crafting memorable passphrases to leveraging cutting-edge security like passkeys, to help you fortify your online accounts.

1. Use Long Passwords: Aim for passwords with at least 15 characters. While complex passwords with numbers and symbols are more secure, they can be hard to remember. Simple swaps like '@' for 'A' are predictable. Instead, adding more characters increases the time it takes for a computer to guess your password.

2. Try using Passphrases: Instead of traditional passwords, combine 3 or 4 random words into a passphrase. This is easier to remember and still secure. For example, "SunnyChocolateMooseHiking" can be remembered with the
story: "It’s a sunny day, you and a moose are hiking while eating chocolate."

3. Avoid Personal Information: Hackers can use social engineering to guess your passphrase if it includes details like your partner’s name, kids’ names, pets’ names, address, or birthday. Keep these out of your passphrases.

4. Unique Passphrases for Each Account: If a service you use gets hacked and your passphrase is exposed, only one account is affected. Reusing passphrases across multiple accounts can lead to much bigger problems.

5. Utilise a Password Manager: Instead of remembering complex passphrases for every account, use a password manager. This way, you only need to remember one passphrase to unlock a vault storing long, random passwords
for all your different services.

6. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Combining multiple authentication factors makes it harder for hackers. Even if they guess your passphrase, they’ll still need your phone or fingerprint to log in.

7. Adopt Passkeys: Where possible, use passkeys stored on your device or phone. They are designed to replace passwords and typically include MFA automatically, enhancing security.