Every first Thursday in May, is celebrated as World Password Day. This initiative first started in 2013 and aims to raise awareness of the importance of protecting information technologies and digital identities, using complex, unique and private keys.
However, cybercriminals are increasingly able to overcome our password barrier and access our personal information. In fact, there are currently more than 9 billion accounts leaked online.
Much of this problem is a consequence of the increase in applications, social networks, mail servers, and websites of all kinds that require credentials to be used. This fact makes users tend to create simple keys and repeat them in different accounts so as not to forget them, which greatly facilitates the third party to enter.
Entergy experts provide a series of aspects to take into account when protecting our digital data with our password:
1. Create A Robust Password With Simple Guidelines
Greater than 8 characters in length, including letters, numbers, and signs, without common words and not related to any personal information, such as a partner, work, hobbies, etc.
Something advisable would be, for example, that they consist of several words and in different languages, without any relation between them, with special characters inserted between each letter.
2. Modify The Password Periodically
The minimum recommended is every six months. Or, if there is an account or application that you have not accessed for a long time, the most cautious thing to do is change it at that very moment, in case someone had accessed during that period of inactivity.
3. Activate Double Authentication
More and more platforms are betting on not only requesting a password, but it is also necessary to enter a password that can either be reached through an SMS or an application such as Google Authenticator.
4. Use A Password Manager
Tools that allow the user to store all this data under a single account and password. In addition, many of these tools are responsible for creating complex passwords for the services in which a user is registered, changing them even from periodically and freeing the user from this tedious task.
5. Use Biometric Solutions As A Compliment
Many devices allow the use of technologies that are based on an individual’s physical characteristics: fingerprint, iris scanner, facial recognition, etc… The main advantages offered by these systems reside, mainly, in their practical impossibility of being used by another person, given that they depend on the characteristics of a single individual.
Without a doubt, the level of protection offered by these measures can be much higher than that allowed by an alphanumeric password. However, depending on the technology, sometimes they may suffer a gap, so the idea is to combine it with the password.
In addition, today they present various challenges such as their high cost and the special protection that such data requires, as stated in theGeneral Data Protection Regulation (RGPD), which prevents these techniques from becoming widespread.
Although they are still at a very primary stage and have to face various obstacles, what is expected is that they will evolve and that we will see them implemented in more and more systems, technologies, and devices.
Conclusion
Techniques based on biometric technology will end up being the main protagonists in protecting our digital profiles. However, this will not be immediate, so we recommend the combination of different factors to enter an account, it is the safest option when it comes to protecting our information
