How Secure Are Your Passwords?

It’s very difficult to go even ten minutes in an online world without having to enter a password. Whether it’s something sensitive like banking or email, or something entirely innocuous like ordering a pizza, the password has become the currency of the internet.
Though our attitudes have become very laissez-faire, even slightly irritated towards the ubiquity of passwords—as they say, familiarity breeds contempt—we become lax at our own risk. If you’ve spent any time around hackers or the types of people that actually know how to use nefarious or invasive tactics to find people’s passwords, they will tell you that most people are hugely vulnerable when it comes to their online identities, thanks to their passwords.
This is for several reasons. Hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated when it comes to the tactics they use to guess passwords, so using your pet or child’s name combined with your house number is probably easier to deduce from your online activity than you realize. In addition, the prevalence of public WiFi networks is a breeding ground for hackers, and with  70% of tablet owners and 53% of phone owners reporting in a survey that they commonly use public WiFi spots, the vast majority of us are vulnerable. In a post on Medium that went viral, Maurits Martijn, from the German publication De Correspondent, spent a day with a hacker on public WiFi networks and reported on what he found:
“But spend a day walking in the city with hacker Wouter Slotboom, and you’ll find that almost everything and everyone connected to a WiFi network can be hacked. A study from threat intelligence consultancy Risk Based Security estimates that more than 822 million records were exposed worldwide in 2013, including credit card numbers, birth dates, medical information, phone numbers, social security numbers, addresses, user names, emails, names, and passwords.”
Still, it’s unrealistic for us to minimize password risk altogether by never leaving the secure WiFi connection of our homes (and even that wouldn’t be 100% risk free). There are several ways to bolster our password security, including using a VPN service when we’re on a public WiFi network, making sure the networks we opt into are legitimate and not honey traps, and never using the same password across multiple websites.
Another key way to protect yourself is to keep your passwords complex and hard to guess so that hackers can’t use some of the more common methods like brute force or guessing commonly used and/or default passwords. However, there is a downside to making your passwords complex; it can be incredibly hard to remember 20 character alphanumeric passwords, but often those are the most secure option. However, luckily there are several tools out there to help you store and automatically remember your complicated and unique passwords once you’ve set them.
1Password is a program stands out among other password managers. In addition to its seamless functionality, attractive interface and excellent cross-browser compatibility, it also helps you generate secure passwords whenever you need to make a new one. In addition, it’s stored locally only, so there’s no chance of a hacker finding out all your passwords by hacking into your account.
LastPass is another popular app which allows you to store all your passwords, helps you craft stronger ones when you have to create a new password, and automatically changes your password in the event you have been hacked.
However you choose to manage your passwords, the key is not to become complacent about your online security. Just because you think your online information wouldn’t be interesting or valuable to someone else doesn’t mean that a hacker might find a way to use it for bad purposes, so it’s best to be proactive by protecting your accounts from the start.