World password day

You probably know there’s a national cheeseburger day (Sept 18), talk like pirate day (ARRRR! Sept 19) and national donut day (June 1) – but did you know about World Password Day?

The first Thursday in May is World Password Day.

Passwords are one of the biggest cybersecurity vulnerabilities today – both personally and in businesses – for good reason.  Creating good passwords is HARD.  Remembering the dozens of passwords we create?  Nearing impossible.

So we get lazy.  The most popular password of 2017 was 123456.  “Password” and “QWERTY” were also on the top list.  Most of us reuse passwords across services – but that means if one gets breached, the rest are now very vulnerable.

The point of World Password Day is to spread awareness about how important good passwords are.

Create Fantastic Passwords

Creating passwords doesn’t have to be so hard.  Here’s 3 simple steps to creating fantastic passwords:

Lose the Sticky Notes

I still regularly see sticky notes with passwords written on them. Instead, there’s a number of great password managers that secure and simplify storing passwords.  Some password managers include:

• LastPass
• OnePassword
• Dashlane
• KeyPass

I do not recommend the built-in password managers in your browser.

I’m not sure it’s more important than International Bacon Day (Sept 1), but having good passwords is a close second.

If you’d like to reduce your security risk, consider training your staff on cybersecurity basics.  Take a look at our Security Awareness Training program – it’s one of the lowest-cost, highest-return investments you can make.