The best way to protect yourself from having your password stolen by bad actors is to understand how they can guess your password — and brute force attacks are one of the most common methods. This is when an automated program attempts to discover your password by entering words often found in a dictionary. If […]

Making a robust password is only part of the password battle. If there’s a publicly disclosed data breach that affects your account, then you’ll want to change your password immediately. You also need to update your online passwords regularly to hedge against the possibility it may be compromised.

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 […]

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.

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 […]