Online security must be a priority when carrying out banking procedures, to have secure work and personal information on phones, computers and tablets. For this reason, passwords should be a matter of concern for everyone.
To begin with, what you should never do is use short passwords that can be obtained through social engineering, such as the name of the pet, important dates or zip codes, nor change an “e” to a “3” or an “o” for a “0” as these are tricks that cybercriminals know about.
This is recommended by E|ng. Marilyn Umaña, from the Cybersecurity Commission of the Costa Rican College of Informatics and Computing Professionals, who also commented that it is essential to use passwords that are easy to remember but difficult to guess, not to reuse passwords on more than one website, as that if someone manages to decrypt one of the passwords or obtains it thanks to a leak, they can use it to access the accounts on more than one website.
“We have seen many cases of people scammed, because their password was compromised in a simple way for hackers, and that is why having a strong password should be a priority for everyone, especially for those who enter daily online to check their bank accounts, to carry out transactions between financial entities, to check e-mails for finding personal information, to review important data from work and even from family members,” Umaña explained.
Always include numbers
The expert added that the numbers must be part of the passwords, as long as they are not the ages, telephone numbers, dates of birth, among others, because they are sensitive and easy to determine data.
Similarly, she recommended not to share passwords with anyone else, since doing so considerably increases the chances of them falling into the wrong hands. This may be because the person with whom it is shared uses them to access the accounts, but also because they do not know how to keep them safely stored and a third party ends up knowing them.
Please don’t use 123456
A study by the security software developer SplashData published in 2015, indicated that the most used password is “123456”, from a list of more than 2 million passwords, this because of the ease it offers people to remember it; however, these types of passwords are already dangerous.
