Passw0rd! Security

A review carried out by the National Cyber Security Centre (part of GCHQ) showed that millions of people are using incredibly simple passwords.

The likes of 123456, qwerty and password were joined by the names of football teams, musicians and family members. These are very insecure to say the least.

Many websites and applications stipulate that passwords must contain upper and lower case letters, a number and a punctuation mark. To use "password" as an example, we might capitalise the P, change the o to a zero and pop an exclamation mark on the end - Passw0rd! This is still weak and quite easily cracked by those in the know.

The Centre advises that using three truly random words provides more security as these are harder to crack. However, as mentioned above, you'd still need to add some numbers and special characters for most websites and systems.

Whilst this is much more secure, you then have the issue of remembering the password and many people resort to writing them down.

This is made more problematic when coupled with the sensible advice that you should not re-use a password on different sites or systems.

What you need is a secure password with a way to remember it and that's where password managers come in. You only need to remember one strong password to get you into the manager and nothing else. To provide even more security, instead of using three random words, the application can create truly random alphanumeric strings for you.

Once you've set it all up (these work on PCs, Macs, tablets and smart phones), simply open up the password manager and copy / paste your details when needed.

You can use this individually or, if you want to share some passwords with your family or a work colleague, you can have a shared password vault.

We would be happy to help you assess your requirements and suggest a password manager that would suit your needs.