Fun fact: I got my first e-mail address in the 8th grade. What a thirteen year-old could possibly be e-mailing anyone about is irrelevant. The point is my password was “mynameisdom” and I used that password until I was in my late twenties. When websites started wanting stronger passwords, I switched it to MynameisDom. And then MynameisDom! And for the most secure possible password, the cherry on top: MynameisDom1! Un-freaking-hackable.

Sike.

Look, I know we all hate Two-Factor Authentication. For those of us who’ve had to use Okta, we curse that app and anyone who’s had anything to do with its creation and widespread usage. But as your online presence continues to grow, so do your cybersecurity risks. Without too much trouble, here are four things you can do to make your passwords more secure:

The best password is the one even you can’t remember. This sounds super counterintuitive: how are you supposed to get into your accounts? Personally, I started using 1Password in 2018 and never looked back. Password management software not only generates secure passwords for you, but you can store sensitive account information or even credit cards in there as well.

Length matters. As a general rule, passwords with over a dozen characters are more difficult to guess. Ideally, it’ll be a mix of random words interspersed with characters and numbers at odd intervals. 

Use a different password for every account. Using “shirt-BLUE-b4sket_cash?-bobble” is a good idea until you start using it for everything else. Using the same password more than once immediately increases your own vulnerability.

Bonus: here are some worst practices. Don’t use song lyrics or idioms, don’t use birthdays, and please, for the love God, do not use “password” as your password or “1234” as your PIN. 

Taking these steps will require a bit of a shift in how you do things, but like anything else, you can get used to it and it’ll eventually become second nature. And, as usual, if you don’t want to set this sort of thing up, then I can do it for you.

Until next time!