{"id":11063,"date":"2025-06-24T17:55:21","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T17:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/colemandev.directivesites.com\/are-you-practicing-good-password-hygiene\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T20:08:20","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T20:08:20","slug":"are-you-practicing-good-password-hygiene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/?p=11063","title":{"rendered":"Are You Practicing Good Password Hygiene?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"eb-entry-article clearfix\" data-blog-content=\"\">\n<h2>How Hygienic are Your Passwords?<\/h2>\n<p>With so many of us relying on so many passwords every day, poor password hygiene can often seem to be a foregone conclusion. Think about your own passwords, right now, and see how they compare to this list of inherently insecure patterns that many people develop:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Personal details, like your name or birthday<\/li>\n<li>Names of friends, family, or most infamously, your pets<\/li>\n<li>Commonly used words (like \u201cpassword\u201d or a favorite sports team)<\/li>\n<li>Simple keyboard patterns (like \u201c12345\u201d or \u201cqwerty\u201d)<\/li>\n<li>Repeated login credentials (like username: David1973, <a href=\"https:\/\/colemandev.directivesites.com\/hey-you-update-your-google-password-right-now\/\">password<\/a>: David1973)<\/li>\n<li>Making their passwords as short as possible<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, before you zip away and try to figure out new passwords for all of the accounts that have these kinds of passwords protecting them, let\u2019s take a few more moments to figure out how to actually come up with ones that will be secure.<\/p>\n<p>To begin, let\u2019s consider some \u201cbest practices\u201d that should no longer be described as \u201cbest.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Some Less-than-Best Practices<\/h3>\n<p>According to NIST (also known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology), the following practices aren\u2019t all that effective any longer when it comes to secure password creation.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><em>Alphanumeric Switching:<\/em> <\/strong>So, we all (should) know that something like \u201cpassword\u201d isn\u2019t nearly secure enough to be used as a password. As a result, many users would use \u201cp455wO2d\u201d instead, changing letters to numerals and occasionally playing fast and loose with their capitalization. While this isn\u2019t always a bad strategy, using such a common password still makes it far less secure than it needs to be.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Length Requirements:<\/strong><\/em> It\u2019s likely that you have encountered this as well, as a program has kicked back your chosen password while announcing that \u201cit is too short\/long for its eight-to-ten character limit.\u201d According to NIST, these antiquated requirements literally short-change security, as longer passwords or passphrases are more difficult to crack but easier to remember than the short jumbles of random characters.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Banning Cut and Paste:<\/strong><\/em> For some reason, many username and password fields don\u2019t allow content to be cut and pasted into them, almost as if the prospect of typing out someone\u2019s account details will stop a hacker in their tracks. This also makes the use of password managers, a hugely useful tool in maintaining good password practices, less available. So long as they are used properly, password managers should always be encouraged, as they enable a user to store and use multiple passwords while only really remembering one.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Password Hints:<\/strong><\/em> We\u2019ve all been asked to set hints for our passwords before, just in case we forget them. You know the ones: \u201cWhere did you graduate from high school?\u201d or \u201cWhat was your first pet\u2019s name?\u201d The trouble with these questions is simple: our online habits make this kind of information easy enough to find online, especially with social media encouraging us to share pictures of our pets, or announcing that we\u2019re attending the \u201cEducational Institution\u2019s Class of Whatever Year\u2019s Something-th Reunion.\u201d Instead of relying on these hints, combine multiple forms of authentication to both offer additional means of confirming your identity and better secure your account.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Frequent Password Changes:<\/strong><\/em> Considering how many passwords we&#8217;re all supposed to remember, it only makes sense that users would fight back against frequent password updates by only changing a single detail about it and calling it changed. For instance, let\u2019s return to David1973 for a moment. If this user were forced to change his password too often, it is likely that he would resort to simply adding an easy-to-remember (and guess) detail. Maybe this is the fifth time that David1973 has been told to change his password, so while his password started as \u201cDavid1973,\u201d it progressed to \u201c2David1973\u201d to \u201c3David1973\u201d and so on to \u201c5David1973.\u201d Of course, we aren\u2019t arguing that passwords should never be changed, but make sure that these changes aren\u2019t actually counterproductive.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>How to Create a Secure Password<\/h2>\n<p>Rather than using a password, per se, we recommend that you instead use a passphrase. Let\u2019s use a quote by author Elbert Hubbard as our example: \u201cPositive anything is better than negative nothing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this is a mouthful to type, in a manner of speaking, so it might make sense to use some alphanumeric switching to help abbreviate it into a complex phrase that is still easy to remember.<\/p>\n<p>Doing so, \u201cpositiveanythingisbetterthannegativenothing\u201d becomes \u201cp0$!tiV3NE+hg&gt;-tiV3_+hg\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Then, if you use this password as the master access code for a password manager, the rest of your passwords\/passphrases could foreseeably be randomly generated, increasing your overall security even further. To make your password manager even more secure, you should really devise your own complex phrase, rather than steal one from an author.<\/p>\n<p>You never know, some enterprising cybercriminal might be a big fan of Hubbard\u2019s works, too.<\/p>\n<p>For more advice and assistance to help you make your passwords and accounts as secure as possible, reach out to Coleman Technologies by calling (604) 513-9428 today!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Hygienic are Your Passwords? With so many of us relying on so many passwords every day, poor password hygiene can often seem to be a foregone conclusion. Think about your own passwords, right now, and see how they compare to this list of inherently insecure patterns that many people develop: Personal details, like your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,57,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-passwords","category-quick-tips","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11063"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12567,"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11063\/revisions\/12567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colemantechnologies.directivesites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}