Password Safety

Putting an End to Account-Hijacking Identity Theft

Passwords are called "Secrets" in security language. However, one of the most common mistakes that employees and consumers make is telling their passwords to another person. That makes stealing information and money relatively easy.

In many companies, passwords changes are required every 60 or 90 days, and they may not be simple; a word in the dictionary, such as "password" or "123456." Many hackers use programs that try all of the words in the dictionary as passwords. To combat hackers repeated attempts to guess a password, most Financial Institutions lock an account after three failed attempts to login.

Passwords should be changed periodically and should not be easy to guess. Use a combination of upper-case and lower-case, numbers and special characters such as @ ! # $ % * ( ) – + = , < > : : " '. The strongest passwords are between 8 to 20 characters.

Another notable tip is to avoid using the same password for every account. Although that makes remembering the passwords more difficult – it prevents a hacker from getting into all of your accounts if they are able to compromise one.

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