Happy World Password Day! The first Thursday in May of each year has been officially declared World Password Day—a day to promote good security hygiene and password habits. In 2017, that day has fallen on May 4. Internet users are encouraged to increase their personal security by improving their passwords so that they are hard to crack. Even though they have been told again and again to have strong passwords, they have bad password hygiene. The fact is that some of the most popular passwords are still “password”, “123456”, “qwerty”, and “abc123”!!! It is as good as not having a password at all! Any hacker would attempt to guess these basic passwords first. Having a strong password is important because hackers are constantly at work day and night to crack passwords and get into accounts for multiple reasons – identity spoofing, stealing valuable information, etc. Once the identity is stolen, it is very difficult and time-consuming to set things right again. So it is very important to get into the discipline of following proper cyber hygiene and follow the rules of having strong passwords and not repeating them across accounts. Once you establish a process of setting strong passwords and finding ways that work for you to remember them, you will find that it’s not that difficult to remember passwords after all. According to Conner Forrest from TechRepublic, there is a simple four-step approach to better passwords. Read Conner's article on World Password Day here.
