Blog Tipz

The average person has to remember what appears to be hundreds of passwords, even more if you have signed up for more services and websites online. It can become hard, especially for bloggers, to be able to manage and keep track of all your passwords, especially for services that you might not use as often.

While this guide might not provide specifics for bloggers, per se, it can be useful if you want to create secure passwords for sites so that your account or entire site/domain is not taken over by someone who is able to access your personal information or work that can’t be compromised.

Remember, these are general tips and cannot be used in all cases – you have to devise your own plan for keeping your information and accounts out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.

1. Use passwords that can be easily remembered.

One of the keys in managing passwords is to think of and use passwords that only mean something to you. In other words, they can easily be remembered, but not thought of. You want to be able to remember them to minimize the number of times that you have to look up the password, which may have been sent to you in an email or kept somewhere else.

2. Do not write down passwords.

In this day and age, nearly anyone has access to your information should you have a copy of it. Don’t open the door for others to use your information and only keep your passwords in a secure password manager or other type of system that you have advanced security for. Not on paper or documents sitting on your hard drive. You shouldn’t be able to access the password-document unless you enter a password.

3. Use non-traditional characters.

While there may be thousands of combinations of letters, you are still at risk if you don’t scramble your password, utilizing numbers, a combination of lowercase/capital letters, and other various symbols. They may take longer to type in, but you increase your chance of having a secure password as you increase length and number of odd characters.

4. Change your password often.

For sites tied to financial documents, personal information, or assets that can’t be replaced, change your passwords rather frequently, as often as once per week. This ensures that if anyone should be able to crack your password, that they won’t be able to access it within a seven day period of you changing your password. This may increase the chance that you forget your password, but security is greater than time.

5. Make sure the site is legitimate and secure to prevent phishing.

Phishing is the fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and other details for your accounts. Make sure that you are on the actual site, with a secure login, in order to prevent this from happening to your account. Browsers are beginning to implement technology to prevent this, but you need to be aware of the risks.

6. More random means less risk.

As referenced earlier, the more random each password and the more random between separate accounts, the less likely someone/a program will be able to access your account. Just because you are able to remember two of the same passwords because they are identical doesn’t mean that a hacker won’t try the same password and compromise two of your most “secure” accounts.

Conclusion

When it comes to anything online, including your blogs’ passwords, make sure that you have a plan to prevent attacks that may include those associated with your login details. You don’t want someone to hack into your account simply because you used your blog’s name and a personal detail for the username and password. They probably won’t help you by blogging for you – they will probably delete all content, add spam links, or redirect your site to a new domain. In all honesty, you wouldn’t want this to happen.