Summary
In honor of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we begin a series on the biggest cybersecurity mistakes people make. The first mistake is not taking care of passwords. Here are the mistakes you might make, and what you can do to correct them.
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October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. On Mondays in October, we will run a series on the biggest cybersecurity mistakes you might make. We will also cover other security related topics throughout the month. Today is cybersecurity mistake number one: not taking care of your password.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
There are two big mistakes that people often make with their passwords.
First, people will choose passwords that are too short or that are easy to guess. And second, they’ll reuse the same password or use a pattern that makes their passwords easy to figure out.
Cybercriminals are known for attempting password stuffing, taking compromised login credentials from one site and trying them on others. If you’ve signed up for an account on a site, even if it was just a trial account, and someone stole your password, an attacker could try those credentials elsewhere. The data on the compromised site might not have been too sensitive, but the data on other sites using the same password could be much more important.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to remember a unique password for every site, so many people choose to write them down in a notebook or store them in a Word document. In almost every case, there are better ways to manage your passwords.
A password manager is the best way to store your passwords and other important data. A password manager may not be perfect, but right now, it’s the best option to store and protect your passwords. When combined with two-factor authentication, strong, unique passwords are the best way to protect your data.