World Password Day: time to change the locks to your accounts!

Today, 6th May 2021, is World Password Day. A great opportunity for you to change your password, make it harder for others to discover and avoid using the same one for all your accounts and apps.

Although they are often overlooked, passwords are your first line of defence against cybercriminals. So you can take good care of the keys to your castle by following these three tips:

• Don’t use the same password for everything. Because if ever your password revealed to the world following a major data leak, it could be used to take control of all your accounts. To find out if any of your accounts has already been compromised in this way, go to www.haveibeenpwned.com. And if you’ve been lucky so far, don’t wait until it happens.
• Create strong passwords. You can’t stay secure if you use “123456” or “abc123” for your password. And mixing in your children’s first names or the town where you live with your date of birth is no better. To create a really good password, the need for something complex is unfortunately much higher than your ability to remember it. As you’ll find on Cybersimple, a “passphrase” (a cleverly abbreviated longer sentence) is one of the best compromises for this.
• Change your passwords regularly. Passwords definitely have an expiry date. This is true for all sorts of reasons (massive data leak, brute force attack, improvements in the hacking techniques available to scammers, etc.) and the same passwords cannot protect you forever. It’s far better to change them regularly than suffer the consequences of a nasty surprise. There again, don’t wait until you’ve checked www.haveibeenpwned.com: simply assume that it’s a good thing to change your passwords on a regular basis, such as every year on the same date.

A password manager can make life easier for you and help you to apply these three tips automatically. A password manager is a piece of software that creates and remembers complex passwords for you, for all of your apps and accounts. Then all you have to do is remember a single password – the one that opens the door to your password manager. Find the best one for you by using the Test Achats comparison feature.