World Password Day: Did YOU Take the Pledge?

The need to keep personal data safe online has never been greater, with cyber-crime growing ever more sophisticated. On May 4th last week, thousands of people took the Password Pledge for World Password Day… did YOU?

There are lots of World Days, some for serious things like the environment and some for fun things like ice cream. World Password Day definitely fits into the first category and it was encouraging to see just how many people got involved. You should join them and make sure your passwords are so strong that it would take a million monkeys on a million laptops a million years to crack them. There is no end to the trouble that can be caused if someone with malicious intent gets into your data; your money, your assets, your credit and even your identity itself are possibly at risk so it cannot be stressed enough just how important password protection is.

So, what should a strong password look like? It should have 13 characters which are a mixture of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and special symbols, with no common words. It might seem excessive but cyber-criminals get smarter every day and you can’t be too careful with your precious online data.

Even this many not be enough to protect your data and so a  feature that is becoming increasingly common for many websites, apps and other password-protected domains is two-factor authentication. This requires some additional form of identification with the password, and choosing to use this service is known as ‘layering up’. There are several ways to provide the second authentication, from a single-use code to a phone fingerprint or USB token.

Most email, social and banking sites now offer the ability to switch on multi-factor authentication and it takes just a couple of minutes to enable the free service - there are lots of tutorials available online.

At Brick, we take data protection extremely seriously and we can help you to do the same. Contact our experts today and find out where your vulnerabilities lie, how we can protect you from them and why our clients and their customers enjoy the safest possible experience online.