Why creating a strong password really matters
About this video
Guemmy Kim explains that a password is like the key to your front door, so it must be both strong and unique for each important account. Password rules exist to make passwords hard to guess, and modern advice says you don't need to change a strong password often unless there has been a compromise.
You'll be able to
- explain why each important account needs a different password.
- explain why password rules (length, numbers, uppercase) exist.
- identify easily guessed passwords and give practical password advice.
Key words
- Strong password
- A password that is very hard for someone else to guess.
- Unique password
- A password you use for only one account, not shared across sites.
- Attacker
- Someone trying to break into your accounts.
Transcript
- All right, Guemmy. So as, as long as I can remember on the internet, you know, there's always been, you create passwords, and I feel like every year they're asking me to create more and more hard or more difficult to remember passwords. Why is this happening?
And and why is just the password creation process so important?
- Yeah, so basically your password is really that key to the front door of your house. And we have to make sure that your password is unique, and it's also very strong. As you can imagine, if you use the same key across all of the houses in the universe, then everybody would have that key and they can get into your house as well.
And so it is really important to make sure that not only that you have a strong password, but for all of those accounts that you do care about each of them are different from each other.
- Right. And there's certain accounts that, I mean it is a good model. I do this, okay. If someone were to get access to this account, how bad is it? My banking account, my social media, those are pretty important. So I wanna make sure I have super strong passwords there.
Well, if it's something that's a little bit more frivolous or something, and it's not the end of the world someone has access, right now you always see these rules you know, at least this many characters a number, a letter, uppercase, lowercase. Why do we keep getting all these constraints being put on our passwords?
- Well, the whole point of it is to make the password as hard to guess as possible. So you don't wanna, you know, use common words or things that can get easily guessed. And it's actually very common for users to use their names or their pet names or birthdays.
These are things that attackers can also guess and will try to get into your accounts as well. That being said, the way that we keep safe online I think the advice has changed over the years. And so it actually you don't actually have to change your password that often as long as you know that there hasn't been a compromise and that you do have a strong password.
And it's also okay to like write your password even on a post-it if you like. But sometimes just being practical is the best way to encourage people to actually have these stronger passwords that they actually can remember and keep up with.
- That's super helpful.
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