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Tips for Creating Strong Passwords and How to Protect Them

Tips for Creating Strong Passwords and How to Protect Them

Passwords are one of the most important innovations of technology and a huge part of our everyday life. If used correctly, passwords can keep our online and electronic information safe from criminals and hackers who could otherwise do harm. However, we all have so many passwords, we tend to take them for granted. Monson Savings Bank is bringing awareness to passwords, sharing helpful tips on how you can create strong passwords and how you can make sure to protect them.

How to create a strong password:

  • A strong password contains at least one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter, one number, and a special symbol. Combining all of these elements makes it harder to guess your password.
  • Do not make your password something easy to guess. Some easy to guess password choices include, but are definitely not limited to, your name, your birthday, and your address.
  • Anything that is public knowledge and important to you, like your children’s names or initials, pets’ names, and birthdays, are generally not strong password choices.
  • Longer passwords, over 15 characters, will be much harder for a criminal to guess so skip the short passwords and go long.
  • Avoid repeating or sequential characters such as “RRRR4444”, or “HIJK1234”.

How to protect your passwords:

  • Email passwords should be completely different from any of your other passwords because when you reset your password, a link is often sent to your email to reset it.
  • Manage your passwords with secure smartphone apps, such as Evernote or LastPass.
  • Experts suggest to have different passwords for all your logins so if one account gets hacked the hackers can’t use that password on one of your other accounts.
  • It is beneficial to change your passwords once a year to add an extra layer of protection. You can set a calendar reminder to repeat annually so you won’t forget to do your annual password update.
  • Set up two-factor authentication (2FA) to add another layer of protection to your accounts. In this case, if a criminal was able to obtain your password, they would not be able to provide the additional login credential to access your information.

Tips for creating strong answers to security challenge questions

  • No one is checking to see if these answers are right, so you can make them whatever you want.
  • Making the answer something that a hacker would never guess for it to be.
  • The answer could be taken from the question. For example, if the security challenge question is “what is your favorite restaurant?” You could make the answer the first and last word of the question combined, “whatrestaurant.”  You could also use the last letter from each word, “tsret.” The benefit of using part of the question is that you will be able to easily remember the answer yourself.

Monson Savings Bank strives to help keep our customers’ private information safe from criminals through various protective measures every day. By understanding the importance of creating strong passwords and protecting them, you can further protect your data and private information.

Read more of our Safety and Security MSB Blog posts here.

 

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