There have been some high profile social media hacking cases recently, notably Chrysler Jeep and Macdonalds. It started me thinking – how often is often enough to change your password?
As a rule of thumb the more popular the account in terms of followers etc the more hackers will value the account and the more often the password should be changed. Whatever you do dont use the same password for all your Social Media accounts – that just makes it easy!
So – what makes a good password ?
According to Microsoft : A strong password:
Is at least eight characters long.
Does not contain your user name, real name, or company name.
Does not contain a complete word.
Is significantly different from previous passwords.
Contains characters from each of the following four categories:
Character category Examples
Uppercase letters
A, B, C
Lowercase letters
a, b, c
Numbers
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Symbols found on the keyboard (all keyboard characters not defined as letters or numerals) and spaces
` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ – + = { } [ ] \ | : ; ” ‘ < > , . ? /
got that ?
I always find that replacing letters with numbers works but is by no means the most secure way of securing your accounts so for instance Hello2U might be better as 43llo2u. Just an idea but enough to keep the hackers thinking.
Next time you have to enter a new password be tricky and dont forget to change them often enough to keep everyone guesssing!