What’s your password? Is it hard to guess? Is it a dictionary word? Maybe it’s just “password” — I hope not! Whatever your password is, it’s the last line of defence protecting your account. Most people claiming to have gotten hacked have either been robbed by a friend whom they shared their password with or someone simply took advantage of their reused or simple-to-guess password.
So, what makes a password secure exactly? It’s not usually what most people think of. For instance, which of these passwords is more secure, “b0B………” or “n47^7d&#B2”? Most of you probably said the second one, “n47^7d&#B2”, is more secure, but it is not. It’s actually the first one, “b0B………”. So, why is that? Well, it mostly has to do with search space and password length. In both passwords, the search space is the same because they both have upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, but the first password is longer. Which password is easier to remember? The first one. It’s just Bob with the case inverted and the upper case “O” replaced with a zero, then 9 periods. So all you really need to remember is Bob and 9 periods. Another way to get a strong password is to write a sentence, such as “I love b00ks!”, or you could even combine the two systems such as, “I love b00ks!!!!!!”. Easy.
Now, a big issue here is that people don’t want to remember a password for each site they use so they end up just making a really good password and using it everywhere. That is dangerous because if one site you use is hacked then every account you’ve used that password for is vulnerable. So, how can you protect yourself from this without having to remember a completely different password for each site? That’s easy, too. You actually have 2 options. The first and easiest is to use a password manager like LastPass. Doing that will let you have one very secure password for LastPass and random passwords for all your other accounts that even you don’t know. The other option is to make the site part of the password. For instance, if you were to make a password for Google you might make the password “I love G00gle!!11&****” and simply swap out “G00gle” for the name of the site you are using, i.e., “I love R3birth!!11&****”. Now, this isn’t perfect because if they know what your password is then they can see the name inside of it. So, you’d need a way to change up the symbols or words. One way to do that is to just use the color you associate with the site, like “I love R3birth!!11RED”. No one will know what color you chose for each site, so the password is easy to remember for you and hard to guess for everyone else. You just need to decide on a system that makes sense to you. Once you do that you’ll be golden.
So, you have the perfect password. How do you keep it safe? Well, the first and most important rule here is: Do not share it. With anyone. For any reason. Many people come to us because someone got into their account and took stuff because they had shared their password with someone. This may have been a good online friend or even a relative. Many people have also taken revenge by deleting all their ex’s characters. Everyone thinks their friend is trustworthy, and everyone thinks that it won’t ever happen to them. But it happens a lot. Way more than it needs to. We do not help people recover things that they lost if they have shared their accounts. It may seem like it’s mean, but we tell you not to account share, we tell you the dangers, and we simply cannot afford to spend the amount of time needed to help people that lost things due to account sharing. If we started helping people that lost things because they were sharing their accounts then significantly more people would do it and that would result in a ton more work for us. We simply can’t do it.
So, hopefully, you take this to heart and secure your accounts and keep your passwords safe. Thanks for choosing Rebirth!