Protect Yourself By Avoiding These Password Blunders

If a talented hacker wants to get into your accounts, they will. It is a sad but true fact. Most online scammers, however, are opportunists. One of the best ways to avoid getting your accounts hacked is to use strong passwords on all of your accounts. Is your password something that a person can guess without even knowing you? Here are some passwords blunders to avoid.

First of all, people are still using sequential numbers as a password. Stop doing that. Whether it is 12345 (didn’t we learn to change that password from watching Spaceballs back in the 80s?) or another iteration (some passwords require up to 10 digits), do something to change up the order. We know you have a lot of passwords and want them to be easy to recall, but using the oldest password in our modern era is not protecting anything.

The same thing holds true with letters. Abcde is hardly better than 12345. Also, avoid passwords such as qwerty. Everyone knows that those are the first 6 letters on a modern keyboard. Other common passwords that are now easily guessed due to the frequency of use are sports (baseball, football, etc.), superheroes (Superman, Batman, etc.), and simple letter and number combinations like trustno1.

So how can you make your password safe and easy to remember? Use personal information that a hacker is unlikely to have about you. Try your favorite movie and your graduation year, like Inception1998. Try to avoid things that the hacker could easily find out about you such as a birth year or the name of your child. That means skipping the favorite movie idea if you have it listed on your social media (Facebook, for example).

Passwords do not have to be complicated randomized letters and numbers to ward off lazy hackers. Just use common sense, avoid the most common password blunders, and try to use personal information that you haven’t posted all over the Internet.