By Sarah Reed
According to Cnet News, 63% of computer users rarely change their passwords, when was the last time you changed yours?
Passwords are like underwear: they should be changed often and not shared with anyone. (Find out more)
Two weeks ago we changed the passwords for all of our FTP and content management log ins for all of the websites we host. This is something that we do continuously in order to keep our clients more secure and reduce the chance of a website being hacked. This is something that everyone should be doing on a regular basis for not only your website, but also for Facebook, your email, and especially online banking systems.
Changing your password is one of the easiest and fastest things you can do to keep your website more secure. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we have online predators – hackers who are trying to steal personal information, damage files, install malware, or redirect websites for personal use. Nowadays, computers or clusters of computers can run through upwards of one million password combinations a second. In a study done by Lockdown UK, six classes of computers were unleashed upon unsuspecting websites to determine how long it would take to crack a variety of password combinations. Most everyday hackers do not have these super computers at their disposal, but hackers of today have evolved and are no longer just the lonely geeks with glasses sitting in their basements for hours trying different letter combinations to break into a website.
If you have not done so within the last three months, you should – right now – go and change your passwords. When changing your passwords, try to be creative and throw in numbers, capital letters, and symbols. As the above study shows, the more complicated your password, the more secure it will be. Just because it’s a more complex password doesn’t mean it has to be hard to remember – if you’re favorite food is “ice cream”, you can make your password “Ic3-Cr3@m” (substitute the e’s for 3’s and incorporate symbols that are similar to the letters). It may be a headache to continually change your password and have to remember the new ones, but it will be much more expensive, time consuming and frustrating if a hacker gets into your site and wreaks havoc.
