You’re giving hackers easy access

Explaining password security

Your house was broken into.

You have 3 safes in your house with 1000’s of dollars. You use the same code for all of the safes. Then you left the code lying around on a piece of paper.

You know you would never do this, but you do it with your online accounts.

You should be using a different password for each online account.

I know it’s hard to keep up with all the passwords. After today, you will understand what a good password looks like, how you can keep up with all of them, and why you should have different passwords.

Let’s dig in.

What does a good password look like?

Passwords should be so hard you could tell someone your password and they couldn’t remember it.

Here’s a good example: as7A34Das#sdd@Anmiopup3#-

The longer the password the better. This being said, some sites will limit how many characters you can use.

The password should never have words in them. Words in a password are easier for a hacker to figure out because they will use a dictionary to scan for words in a dictionary.

Why should I have different passwords for each account?

Data breaches are the most common way hackers get passwords.

Data breaches are when a hacker hacks a company and retrieves information about its users. If this data includes passwords. If you use this same password for every site, the hacker just got enough information to get into every account you have.

This is where the safe analogy comes into play at the beginning of this letter.

How do I keep up with many different passwords?

There are applications called password managers. These applications will help you generate good passwords. Also, they help you save all your login information. Some will even help you with 2FA (2-factor authentication).

The browser you use has this feature but they are lacking some features like password generation and 2FA.

Some good password managers are 1Password (what I use), LastPass, and BitWarden. They are set up to sync to all the different devices you use. Also, they auto-fill the passwords into apps and websites for you.

p.s. hit the heart if this helped you