Do you take enough measures to ensure a cyber criminal wont guess your password?
If you choose to use a common, default, or easy to guess password, you are putting your private data at risk!
To keep your information safe online, read on and find out how to create a strong password. It’s the vital line of defence between you and the bad guys.
Plus, get an exclusive sneak peek at a CyberStart password security challenge!
Common passwords, a common problem
Common passwords are used so often because they are easy to remember. The unfortunate flaw is that they are also extremely easy to guess.
The top ten most common passwords of 2020 according to techviral.net are:
- 123456
- 123456789
- qwerty
- 12345678
- 111111
- 1234567890
- 1234567
- password
- 123123
- 987654321
How to create a strong password
As future cyber security experts, we would hope a poor password choice would not be why one of your accounts is compromised. However, there is no harm in reminding ourselves and others what a strong password looks like.
Our top tips for creating a secure password
- The longer the password, the better. Longer passwords are usually harder to crack.
- Things to avoid are easy to guess names, places, or pets related to you.
- Don’t use the same password for more than one account.
- Pick between four to five random words that don’t relate to each other. Use spaces, underscores, dashes or any symbol you like to separate the words. Then, make up a story that links each word together to remember your password.
- Use a password manager. A password manager will ensure you never have to reuse a password. It will automatically create a secure code and save it in a safe place. Take some time to research the best password manager tool for you.
- Use multi-factor authentication where possible to provide a second line of defence to your password.
Learn more about password security
We hope we’ve given you the perfect excuse to update your old, outdated, and easy-to-guess passwords. It’s the best way to prevent cyber criminals from worming their way into your accounts and stealing your data.
To build on password best practices and learn more about the fascinating topic of password security, CyberStart has lots of fun challenges for you to tackle.
Let’s take a closer look at one of the challenges in our HQ base…
HQ L03 C08 - Route into the Router
The ‘Route into the Router’ brief requires you to gain access to a cyber criminal gang member’s home network. The ability to carry out this case depends on whether the cyber criminal has left the default router login information unchanged.
How do we find out the default login information? Time to investigate! With a quick ‘Moogle’ in the search engine, you can scan the results to find the particular brand of router and its default login information.
It sounds simple, but it shows that using common or default passwords can easily make you vulnerable to a cyber security attack! Once a cyber criminal has access to your router, they can access countless other devices.
Are you interested in finding out more about password security? The CyberStart HQ base is full of hundreds of challenges, just like this, that will allow you to get hands-on experience with real-world cyber security tasks.
