The I.U.P.A. IT Department wants to remind our Local Leaders and Members of the importance of strong passwords to protect yourselves when using technology. Here are some important tips!

Dealing With Passwords the Easy Way

With the number of websites that you probably have accounts for, there’s simply no way to easily remember every single password without duplicating them. This is where a password manager comes in. As long as you create a strong master password that you can remember, that is the last password you will need to deal with.

What Is A Strong Password?

A 12-character minimum is required: You need to choose a password that is long enough. There is no minimum password length that everyone agrees on, but you should generally go for passwords that are a minimum of 12 to 16 characters in length. A longer password would be even better. A strong password includes numbers, symbols, capital letters, and lower-case letters. Use a mix of different types of characters to make the password harder to crack. Also, stay away from obvious dictionary words and combinations of dictionary words. Any word on its own is bad. Any combination of a few words, especially if they are obvious, is also bad. For example, “house” is a terrible password. “Red house” is also very bad. Avoid the use of common substitutions also. For example, “H0use” is not strong just because you have replaced an o with a 0. That is just obvious.

Strong Password Examples

For example, maybe you can find it easy to remember a sentence like “The first house I ever lived in was 613 Fake Street. Rent was $400 per month.” You can then turn that into a password by using the first digits of each word, so your password would become TfhIeliw613FS.Rw$4pm. This is a strong password at 21 digits. Sure, a true random password might include a few more numbers and symbols and upper-case letters scrambled around, but it’s not bad at all. You just need to remember two simple sentences, so it is easy to remember.

Password Vault

You can use password generators to generate strong passwords. An example of a good one can be found here.