Published on January 14, 2012 How to choose a secure password for your online shop admin?
It can be hugely inconvenient remembering a lot of passwords and maintaining them, but the risks of someone compromising your password do outweigh the inconvenience. Would you leave your house unlocked when you go out because you can’t find where you left the keys? Or change all of your locks on your house and car so they used the same key?
Cyber criminals are lurking in wait, looking for websites they can compromise, people they can exploit and money they can steal. To reduce the risk of you being a victim, having a solid password policy for your shopping cart website’s store admin and other parts of your business is essential. Here are a few tips for creating a solid password policy and following it.
Don’t use the same password for everything
If you use the same password for everything and one of the things using this password gets compromised, then you are leaving yourself open to an under-the-radar attack that you might not even notice until it’s too late.
How to remember your passwords?
The trick to having secure passwords that you can remember is to use a system to generate your passwords that you can remember. We can take a leaf from memory-techniques here, and take advantage of the better ability of the human brain to recall images and associate things with those images.
Here’s an example of how you could do it. For every password you need to remember, take the website that it is for and create an over the top picture in your mind of something to do with that site. Something with an action in it will be easier to remember and the more over the top the image is, the better. Create a sentence to describe the picture and then take the first letter of each word in the sentence and use that as the basis for your password.
Don’t settle for just words though, cyber criminals can create programs to test hundreds of passwords based on alphabetic combinations of letters. You need to add upper and lower case numbers and symbols too – if the program you are using accepts them. If someone in your picture has a t shirt, imagine some symbols on it, or work them into the picture in a memorable way.
Good passwords need to be:
- Different – not just letters, not just numbers, a combination of numbers and letters is best
- NOTHING associated with you – not your children’s name, not sequences of numbers, not your car number plate number, not your birthdates
- Longer is better – don’t waste your time with passwords shorter than 8 characters long.
If remembering passwords is a challenge, there are also encrypted password manager softwares that you can buy, or services you can subscribe to and check anywhere – so you only have one password/image to remember.
No Comments