Welcome to integrity first Corporation, cybersecurity in October program. In week two, we are going to discuss using strong passwords and perhaps a password manager. 

To create a strong password, there are a few tips and tricks to remember. The reason that you want a strong password is it’ll help you keep your data secure. In fact, according to IDtheftcenter.org studies have found that a passwords guessability by hacking software decreases exponentially with every additional character. 

Creating something that’s easy to remember, but hard to guess is key to a successful password. 

Perhaps you’ll want to incorporate a favorite song, a favorite quote, your favorite sports player into a password and it becomes more complex and difficult to guess. You’ll want to make sure that it’s at least 12 characters long, has uppercase and lowercase letters in it, has at least two numbers, and it has at least one symbol in it. 

One thing that I commonly suggest is use the lyrics to one of your favorite songs like flymetothemoon!12 or something along those lines. You want to make sure that it’s something that might be a little bit more difficult for someone to perhaps put in, guess, or even have machine learning guess. 

The other thing is, you’ll want to have a unique password for each account. 

The average American has over 90 passwords. So one thing that you’ll want to do or look into is a password manager app that can help you remember your passwords. A password manager is basically a secure vault for all of your passwords. Basically like a glorified post-it note that sticks on your computer, but a lot more secure. 

You only have to remember the one password to get into your Password Manager app, which will allow you and your computer to access the rest of your passwords for all of your logins. 

Typically, depending upon the application that you purchase, you can access these passwords on your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. This also means you can and should create different passwords for every single online account that you have. This should keep you ahead of any hackers.

Let INF know if you have any questions and join us next week for Level Three.