Protect Passwords
Despite warnings to the contrary, many people still set their password as their favourite pet, date of birth or the place where they were born. A few simple precautions can make the process of guessing a password – and in turn gaining unauthorised access to your business’s IT systems – more difficult:
Set a password specification: Specify that the password has to be a mixture of letters and numbers, or capitals and lowercase letters, which makes guessing it much harder.
Arrange expiry dates for passwords: Staff then have to change their passwords or access codes regularly, which reduces the time that someone has to guess a password.
Don’t require the change to be too often, however, so that staff members have to write down multiple passwords, which compromises security.
Substitute numbers for letters: For example, if you make the password ‘sandwich’, modify it by substituting the ‘@’ symbol for ‘a’ and the number ‘1’ for ‘i’. Add some numbers at the beginning or end of the word to make it around ten characters long. Using this method your password becomes ‘8s@ndw1ch8’, ...
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