Nowadays it is extremely easy to suffer an attack on your accounts, especially if they concern banking or postal services and allow you to buy online. In order to prevent the attackers from doing operations for us or stealing all the money we will have to choose a password strong enough to be neither intuitive nor "crackable", since the tools used by hackers allow you to recover passwords consisting of words, names, common things and numbers.
We find out in this guide how to choose a secure password for any account used on the Web: from the tricks for choosing the password to the programs that can help you generate random passwords, up to the additions to increase the security of the accounts (such as two-party authentication factors).
READ ALSO: Generate a strong Password for all websites
1) How to choose a secure password
To choose a secure password, simply follow simple rules, applicable every day.
Here is the complete list of tips to follow to make your password truly secure:
- Avoid personal dates and names : although they are easy to remember, we avoid using birthday dates, event dates and common family names to create a password.
An attacker sufficiently informed about our knowledge and habits (or our birthday) could come to guess the password in no time.
- We avoid names of famous people or things : we are fans of Star Trek and we use this science fiction world to create passwords "> How Secure Is My Password?
By entering the chosen password, it will be shown how long the password can be cracked by a hacker: it goes from a few picoseconds (i.e. instantly) to over a billion years for more complex passwords (in theory it is also possible to obtain passwords that can only be cracked with times beyond the age of the universe!).
Without exaggerating we can be satisfied with passwords that need a few tens of years to be cracked (with current means), so that we can be sure enough not to be able to undergo hacker attacks.
3) Programs to generate and store secure passwords
We don't have enough imagination to create secure passwords "> KeePass.
We download version 2.xx, install it and start creating the database where we can keep all the passwords.
Among the tools available together with the program is the random password generator, accessible from Tools -> Password Generator .
We can configure our password by entering the characters with which it must be formed, the length of the same or alternatively use a predefined profile or an algorithm for generation.
The randomness of the password is guaranteed by entropy generated by the movement of the mouse: the more you move the mouse, the "random" password will be generated.
If instead of an offline program we prefer to use an online service, the best is LastPass, reachable from here -> LastPass .
We add the browser extension or the mobile app and, when generating a new password, click on the service icon and select Generate secure password .
To learn more about LastPass and other services to save passwords online we can read the dedicated guide available here -> Best apps to manage passwords on Android and iPhone
4) Increase the security of an account
We want to further increase the security of our online accounts "> Sites / apps where you can activate two-step password verification
