Reusing passwords, don’t do it!

Passwords are the key to every door you open online, for every service you use, without a password you get nowhere. The use of passwords makes accessing your services and information more secure; however, your data and security is only so safe. More can be done to help protect your data.

Many years ago, at the dawn of time before the internet was commonplace, using the same passwords for all services was a done thing, everyone used the same password because it was easy, right? Well, yes it was, however, nowadays using the same password for everything puts you at risk of not only losing access to one site but all sites that use the same password.

If you use the same password for every site and a malicious attacker manages to obtain your username and password, then you could be at risk of all sorts, including identity theft, data loss of all sorts.

By just putting in your email address to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ you can see straight away how many times your email address and/or passwords have been involved in data breaches. I will be amazed if you do not have one leak shown on this site.  With each data breach comes a torrent of bots and companies looking over the data, injecting all the usernames, passwords, contact information for the reason of either holding you to ransom or stealing information one way or another.

By ensuring that you have a single unique strong password (we’re talking a minimum of 10 characters here) for every site you visit will help reduce any fall out of password reuse. But I hear you ask, how are you meant to have single unique passwords for every site? We’ll this is simple, utilise a password manager application, such as 1Password or LastPass, or one of the others around. But don’t write them down and don’t reuse them.

Then once you have gone through all your websites and changed all your passwords to someone more secure, you can then look at using two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication or 2FA adds a further layer of protection around your access. But we’ll discuss this in another blog article sometime.