Tips to help make annually updating your passwords (relatively) painless
You’ve heard it all a million times: “Change your passwords frequently… Use strong passwords… Don’t re-use the same password on multiple accounts… Don’t save your passwords in a file on your computer called ‘passwords’… Don’t log in to accounts using shared free wi-fi…”
If you’re like the vast majority of people though, you’re more likely to walk on a bed of nails than update your passwords regularly.
Here are a few tips to help make annually updating your passwords (relatively) painless:
1) Eat the elephant one bite at a time:
Avoid the overwhelm of trying to do everything all at once by simply updating each password as needed. When you’re asked to log in to a site for the first time in the new year – don’t just hit that login button which has already captured your saved username and password. Instead take the additional few minutes right then to reset your password or log in and then immediately change your password. (Make sure you keep track of which sites you’ve updated your passwords for as you go so you don’t forget.)
2) Use a theme and word associations for your passwords:
While the passwords you create for different accounts should be unique, an easy way to help with remembering them is to choose a new theme every year. Then relate that theme to a unique password for each individual site access by creating word associations.
For example, let’s say your theme for this year is “elephants”. Your word association for accessing WordPress might be something like “blogging elephants”. Now all you need to do is turn that into a ‘strong’ password that couldn’t be easily guessed by hackers, but would be memorable to you. Something creative like “WP=bLog4Elephants”. Yes, it’s okay to include initials or the acronyms for the site in your password, as long as it’s not the key component of your password.
3) Verify your password strength online:
Use a password checker like The Password Meter to verify the password you’ve create is strong. As you can see from the results here, “WP=bLog4Elephants” scores 100% as Very Strong.
4) Let someone else do it for you:
If updating and managing all your own passwords yourself still seems too painful to deal with, consider using a password management tool like LastPass or Meldium. There’s still a fair bit of work to be done to set up your accounts and passwords using a password management tool, but once you’ve done it the first time, annually updating your passwords becomes a breeze in the future.
So no more excuses — get your passwords updated! (Unless you aren’t really concerned about cyber fraud and identity theft…)