Losing a critical password can be unfortunate, locking you out of a key account like online banking or email. Password managers are great for keeping track of your credentials. As another layer of security, you may think about also writing down passwords and keep them in a secure location. Paper-based backup has the benefit of being […]

The best practice when making accounts online is to have different passwords that change frequently for separate accounts. How can you be expected to remember them all? You aren’t if you use a password manager. These apps let you use one master password to access all of your login information in one place. This lets […]

If you regularly post on social media or disseminate details like addresses and names online, a criminal might attempt to break past your security questions because they have enough information to guess the answers. So why not make them up? Come up with the false name of a childhood best friend, your first street, favorite […]

Some websites and applications allow or even require special characters – like < and ! – in passwords. If you have the option to include them, do so, since their presence makes the password more difficult to guess than if it only contained alphanumerics.

While it is totally possible to produce your own strong passwords – ones based on phrases for instance – it often may be more trouble than it’s worth. Many password managers, including ones built into OSes like Apple iOS, can take care of password generation, storage, organization and retrieval for you.

Studies have shown that overly complicated passwords — i.e., complex combinations of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters — are forgotten and require changing frequently. Instead, combine familiar words to create a longer password. Hacking software usually works by systematically figuring out each character of a password one-by-one, so the more characters you […]