As passwords are your keys to many digital things, you probably want to ensure that it is reasonable secure and strong right? There is a lot of advice out there when it comes to creating a strong password, and while most of it is good, some of the recommendations should not be listened.

Part of my responsibilities as a penetration tester was to see if one could determine a user’s password through means like brute forcing. Through those experiences, I’ve gotten insight into what password strategies work against current techniques attackers use.

So how do you create a strong password? Here are four simple tips to secure your digital accounts.

  1. A minimum password length of 12 if permitted
  2. Have a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters
  3. Use a random password generator to generate the above
  4. Use a password manager to store all your strong passwords and make sure you use a strong password on your vault as well!

In the next post series, I will explain how I came up with these tips and why you should follow them.