Whether it’s securing access to a computer or an online account, passwords are ubiquitous in our digital lives. It is also one of the main weak points of our accounts and hackers have more than one trick up their sleeve to try to steal them or guess them.

Those to avoid

Cunning, especially with phishing techniques, is widely used by hackers. They send an email imitating popular services hoping that you will log on to a fake site with the same design codes as the official sites. They can recover your password.

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But sometimes they don’t need to use these techniques and can guess the passwords… with your help. Many users choose a password that is too easy to guess. In the top 10 of the worst passwords of the year 2021, we still found the classic 123456 in first place according to the results of a study established by NordPass. These passwords are obviously tested first by hackers.

• 123456
• 123456789
• 12345
• qwerty
• password
• 12345678
• 111111
• 123123
• 1234567890
• 1234567

How to choose and store them

A password must therefore be complicated to be secure. If you choose to create them yourself, you should favor long and complex passwords including numbers, letters, upper and lower case letters, but also special characters. There are mnemonic devices to remember it.

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But the easiest way will be to use dedicated tools like a password manager. And since it is impossible to remember all the passwords which are created randomly and it is strongly recommended to use a unique password for each site, the software can be used as a safe to keep the stored passwords. This type of software is generally locked by a unique password, which you will need to memorize.

Check your passwords

You probably already have dozens or hundreds of passwords for as many services and accounts. You may be using your browser’s feature to remember all of your credentials. Browsers like Chrome or Firefox offer tools to check if your password has not been hacked.

To perform this operation, they use databases recovered from hackers and compare the stolen passwords to yours. If they detect that your password exists, they notify you and help you change it. Tools like the one offered by NordPass and its “Data Breach Scanner” will allow you to analyze your passwords and identify those that have been compromised. Of course, do not use a password that has already been hacked.