Statistics clearly show that criminal activity increases during the holiday season and therefore it is imperative that business owners take the proper precautions and not let their guard down.

Unauthorized attacks and abuse of your business or personal information can potentially cost your business thousands of dollars each year. However, following our simple guidelines to improve your passwords can help you protect your business.

The lack of password security is a major source of abuse on the Internet. Most abuse occurs when someone you know guesses your password or by people running program lists of possible passwords (for example, the English dictionary) against your password to find a match.

What not to use as a password

Passwords that should not be used are those that can be easily determined or generated:

• Do not use the word ‘password’ or any variation (password1, PASSWORD)
• Your given name or variations of your given name (walter, WALTER, retlaw, Walter, wAlter, walter0, walt3r, Retlaw4).
• Your car license plate, room/phone number, date of birth, pet names, or anything that other people can easily associate with you.
• Patterns like 123456, qwerty, ABC123.
• Default passwords: Always change it to one that you have selected yourself.
• All standard dictionary words and derivatives (including foreign dictionaries).

Recommendations for choosing good passwords:

A good password consists of at least 8 characters.

All passwords must satisfy three of the four character categories:

• at least one character is a lowercase letter
• at least one character is an uppercase letter
• at least one character is a number
• at least one character is a non-alphanumeric character in the password ( ! @ # % = & * ).

Your new password should be hard to guess but easy to remember, otherwise you’ll be tempted to type it in, which kills its function entirely.

Some useful methods to compile a new password:

• Add two words that together, that combined consist of eight characters but have no connection to each other. Put a punctuation mark in the middle and convert some characters to uppercase. Examples: ‘Dogs+trEe’, ‘coLouR#me’.
• Use the first few characters of the words in a certain sentence (not too common). When we use the sentence ‘My goldfish are called Justerini and Brooks!’ as an example, we would get the password ‘MgacJaB!’.

Change your passwords regularly.

This can help keep criminals and other malicious users off guard. A password of less than 8 characters should be considered valid for only one week, while a password of 14 characters or more (and follow the other rules described above) can be valid for years.

The festive season should be a time of relaxation and generosity. By being vigilant and taking simple steps, the risks of being a victim can be substantially reduced.