Secure your web space with a secure password

Your first line of defense on the web is creating the strongest password possible, this will help protect your computer, your data and your online accounts including your UK web hosting plan with us. This may sound like common sense but hackers have become increasingly sophisticated at “cracking” users passwords, what may have been considered a strong password a year ago may now be considered an open window to your computer. Internet security is based on a “weakest link” principle; hackers are constantly searching to find the weakest link possible to give them access to a network or computer, often that weak link is a weak password.

The basics for a secure password

Here’s some basics guidelines you can follow to create a strong password:

• Use both upper- and lower-case letters.
• Incorporate numbers or punctuation marks.
• Use at least one of these special characters: ! @ # $ % * ( ) – + = , < > : : “ ‘
• Make it at least 8 characters long.
• A strong password does NOT, in any way, use your personal information, such as name, phone number, birth date, address or names of anyone you know.
• Come up with something you can remember easily, but would be virtually impossible for anyone else to guess.

So, what can happen when you don’t have a strong password? If someone else is able to guess or crack your password you potentially give them access to your e-mail, your bank accounts, your contact lists or anything else you may have on your computer. They could start to alter or destroy files or even overtake your computer and turn it into a zombie. (A zombie computer is one overtaken by a hacker and used to perform malicious tasks, such as sending out large amounts of spam.)

How do people crack passwords?

There are a lot of techniques being used to steal passwords. Some of the most common include:

• Guessing. There are a number of programs designed to guess a user’s password based on information found online about the user, such as names, birth dates, names of friends or significant others, pet names or license plate numbers. They can even search for a word spelled backwards.
• Dictionary-based attacks. Programs and software also exist that will run every word in a dictionary or word list against a user name in hopes of finding or guessing a password.
• “Brute Force” attacks. This attack method refers to trying every conceivable combination of key strokes in tandem with a user name to find the password. There are programs that can run brute force attacks in very quickly. The best way to beat a brute force attack is to have a long and complex password, using upper and lower case letters, numbers, special characters and punctuation marks.
• “Shoulder surfing.” Be careful when logging on to a computer in a public place, such as a computer lab, cybercafé or library. There may be hackers lurking around for the express purpose of watching people enter their user names and passwords.

Secure your website hosting password

Our website hosting has brute force protection in place to protect users cPanel, FTP and mailbox passwords but within your web hosting account you will create other passwords such as your passwords for web applications such as WordPress and Joomla, it’s critical that you secure your accounts by ensuring that these passwords are secure, a strong password will safe guard your account from hackers.

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