Lifehack: Treat your passwords as delicately as you treat your underwear

There is no decent alternative to passwords, especially when it comes to protecting your email, personal finances and devices that store your personal data. That’s why it’s crucial to use unique reliable combinations — at least for the most vital websites and services.

Here is a question, think about your underwear. You probably are selective on who you show them and change them regularly? As a matter of fact, it is also the best policy to mirror for passwords. Sad reality though is that few people behave in this manner.

Kaspersky Lab has recently conducted some unusual research. A jocose comparison of people’s daily habits revealed that citizens of the Netherlands and United Kingdom are the most cyber savvy, as roughly a third of them owns more passwords than pairs of underwear.

The majority of people change lingerie regularly — almost every day or even more often. As for passwords, only one in two renew them at least every six months. Others keep the same passwords for years, if not forever.

At the same time, people are anxious that anyone could gain access to their personal data. More than a quarter of Europeans think that to keep their personal data accessible for everyone would be a nightmare. Even worse than being seen without underwear.

The problem to be focus on here is that so many users only care about security to a medium level, if they care about it at all. For example, they use only one password for all of their accounts and don’t change it, which is a bad idea. In this case all a criminal needs to do is to compromise one of your accounts to gain access to all of your other accounts – including your primary e-mail and even Internet bank.

Some users choose very short passwords, while a decent combination is much longer. It should contain letters, numbers and symbols. A long real word is not an option — almost every criminal can use the brute force method to enter even the whole English dictionary successively, until they find your password. Combinations that consist of any personal names can be hacked just as easily.

How strong is your #password? Check it here: http://t.co/9ILaxq503k https://t.co/P9Pm0SGc4n #internet #security #infosec

— Kaspersky (@kaspersky) August 21, 2015

And finally, many people share their passwords with relatives, which is not secure at all. Your family members can be less cyber-savvy and that’s why they can unwillingly put your passwords at risk. It’s better to protect them and yourself from embarrassing situations and keep your passwords completely private.

So let’s say “no” to any half-assed solutions and create reliable passwords for all of your accounts. If you know how to handle it, it’s not that hard to remember unique combinations for each and every of your accounts. Here is our video guide on how to do it almost at the touch of a button (or a few buttons).

 If you don’t want to bother and invent reliable combinations on your own, you can use a special tool called password manager. We recommend our own solution — Kaspersky Password Manager, which can generate strong passwords, store them securely and synchronize them across multiple devices — PC, Mac, Android and iOS. With this tool you’ll need to remember only one master password — and be sure, that all of your accounts are reliably protected.