Is your password secure?

We use many passwords on a daily basis to access both business and personal accounts. Despite the fact we know that every account should have its own password, in reality we often compromise our digital security by using the same passwords repeatedly.

At the same time, all you have to do is use a program that will solve this problem for you: not only will it remember passwords, but in addition, it will also help you create a really strong password.

Password management programs

Methods of writing down passwords on paper, in e-mails or in unencrypted files should be a thing of the past. These practices leave your accounts at risk. Instead, you can store them safely in one place using a freely available programs, for example NordPass, Bitwarden, Enpass Password Manager or KeePass program, which you can download from this link.

In addition, KeePass allows you to clearly organize passwords into different folders, and you can save accompanying information with them, such as a login name, a URL link to a website or a text description. Besides that, it also evaluates the strength of the password itself and can also generate a new, stronger password for you.

If you plan to use any of the passwords in the KeePass database, just highlight the line for the application in question and press Ctrl+C to copy the password to the clipboard. Pressing Ctrl+B copies the username to the clipboard. By double-clicking on the text in the URL column, you can open the URL address of the application directly in the browser window.

In order not to lose all passwords in case of a computer failure, you can export and back up the entire database to, for instance, a USB key.

Is your password compromised?

Attackers use two main tactics in their attacks. The first is a dictionary attack, where they gradually try user passwords from leaked databases and language dictionaries. They try the most common user passwords first. The second tactic is creating passwords from a sequence of characters using the so-called brute force. For example, passwords with 2 characters will be tried as aa, ab, ac, ad.

The best defense is to use a sufficiently long and complex password. Therefore, when creating it, follow three basic rules:

A strong and memorable password should be:

  • long enough (minimum 12 characters)
  • sufficiently complex (combination of letters, numbers and special characters)
  • anonymized (do not use your name, date of birth or residence address)

Most used leaked passwords

The security company NordPadd published the statistics of the most used passwords that were leaked from more than 50 countries. It proves that people most often use their first name as a password. In Slovakia, we can also find car brands, animals and sports clubs among them.

However, the first 4 most common passwords of Slovak users are the same as those used worldwide, namely 123456, 123456789, 12345 and qwerty.

You can view the entire statistics on this link.