Published on 28 Nov 2023.
We asked Kinamo colleagues to write an article about what they thought of when they heard "Data Protection. We didn't pick this topic lightly. We deliberately hooked into 'Data Protection Day,' and 'Change Your Passwords Day.' Both 'holidays' were created to sensitize people around their online data safety.
The article below around passwords comes from Sophie, marketing manager for Kinamo. Inspired by Koen's article on safe websites, safe online data backup and password managers, she herself previously wrote about online data maintenance on social media.
Let's start with a few jokes around the subject. Mind you, came up with them myself (sorry) 😊
Online security and protecting your online data are things that people are increasingly concerned with. We do have an obligation to think about it more now that GDPR, ransomware and hacking are also topics on the news on television.
We all very much want our data to remain private but it shouldn't be too difficult. We don't want to put a lot of effort into keeping our data private. One should be able to remember a password, using different passwords is confusing and logging in should not take too long or require too many steps.
And yet we are all in shock when a list of thousands of email addresses and passwords appears online. How is it possible that the company that holds these has not better protected our data. Often still a legitimate question but data shielding does have several links. One of those links is how people handle their passwords and account.
I myself am not a hero at "remembering" passwords and strongly recommend the use of a password manager. My colleague Koen wrote an article about that.
For the rest, there remains the choice of a good password. Because, what even is a 'strong' password? As a general rule, I take the following:
Passwords are like underwear
Don't use personal and easily retrievable information in your passwords. For example, the granddaughter's name or the city and zip code of your address are not good passwords.
Use different types of characters such as uppercase letters, numbers, punctuation, lowercase letters, ... .
A longer password will also improve security. Our Sysadmin Koen even recommends a password of 16 to 24. If you use a password manager you don't even have to remember it!
Maybe you can make it a passphrase. But take something that cannot be easily guessed. Our supplier of SSL certificates, GlobalSign, wrote an interesting post about passwords. With six characters (letters and numbers, but all lowercase and no symbols), there are 2.25 billion possible combinations. If someone uses a Web app that makes 1,000 attempts per second, it can crack this password in 3.7 weeks.
Safe On Web also has some good tips around strong passwords.
What's the worst password you've ever used? Let us know.
Keeping your data safe online takes an effort but keeps us - like going to the dentist regularly - healthy.