Compromised passwords are responsible for 81% of hacking-related breaches!
A key part of overall information security is securing your passwords.
So, what can you do to make your password more difficult to hack?
It’s not as hard as you would think, and there are now new guidelines and standards being recommended to ICT on how to enable a secure password, it’s called Passphrase.
Passphrases enable you to make associations that are unique to you alone, you can remember words as images and create a picture of your passphrase. For example, if you look around where you are sitting right now, you will notice items specific to you that can be used to generate your passphrase. Let’s say as an example that you are at your desk right now and you have a photo of a friend and yourself on holiday in a white picture frame, you could use the passphrase,
Holiday2019FRANCEwhite
it’s easy for you to picture in your mind every time you need to recall the password, it’s also 22 characters in length, a great password, and not so hard to remember, but from the hacker’s perspective very random and not easy to crack.
Changing Your Password to a Passphrase...
Steps to follow:
- Have your passphrase ready, using the password strategy guide above.
Remember you can only change your password when onsite at school and logged into a school computer with your school login account.
When you are logged onto the computer press the following keys CTRL+ALT+DEL to launch the ‘Windows Security’ menu.
Select Change a password.
Type your old password first, then enter your new passphrase using the Password Strategy concept, enter this passphrase twice to confirm the correct spelling. Click OK when finished.
(It’s always best to save your passwords into a password manager, for example, when your browser asks for credentials to be saved, save them, it’s an encrypted password store, this will help you make different passphrases for all your accounts, remember not to use your school passphrase on any other account. Also do the same on your smart phone, but always make sure you have a secure pin configured for the device.)