12 Days to a Secure Christmas – Passwords

If you are looking for French Hens or Golden Rings you won’t find them here.   Reis Informatica is giving you the gift of tips and tricks to help keep your business safe and secure this holiday season.  Check out today's tip about passwords!

In a world where almost everything is connected to a single source, our wireless routers. Having everything connected to our Wi-Fi is pretty useful. It makes managing our devices remotely easily accessible from anywhere if anything goes wrong. The issue is that once somebody gets access to the source, they can get access to everything that's connected to your wireless router to some degree or another. 

So how do we make our Wi-Fi connection more secure? 

The most common way is by having a secure password. 

Here are five things you can do to protect yourself and your router from hackers:

1. Once your modem arrives, change your password immediately since most routers come pre-configured with a default password. 

2. Avoid using common passwords.

3. Use at least 15 characters and make your passwords as long as possible. According to research, making your password longer is the best way to make it stronger. 

4. Use a mix of characters with lower – and upper–case letters, numbers, and special characters. 

5. Avoid using sequential passwords or keyboard paths. Like QWERTY! Or 1234. 

If you apply all these steps, you should end up with something like this: EuR0pe$368(j0uRn3Y

You might think a password like this is impossible to remember. An excellent way to make them longer and stronger is by using phrases or quotes and spicing them up by mixing numbers and special characters. Like What we think, we b3come!  The key is to use words and numbers that are easy to remember for you, laid out in a hard-to-guess manner. 

A bonus tip to help you manage your passwords is by having a password management system. Some people store them in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. You can choose to use an app called LastPass. This password vault stores all your passwords for all your devices, accounts, and yes, even your wireless router. 

And if you want to go above and beyond to protect your wireless connection even more, here are some bonus tips from us!

• Restrict physical access to your router. Direct access to your router will make your password useless, no matter how complex. 

• Disable WPS: This allows a user to bypass the need to enter a password by physically pressing a button and connecting to your router. 

• Hide your SSID: Completely hiding your network from public view, you can add an extra layer of security. 

• MAC Filtering: Restrict access to your router by blocking any connections that don’t belong to any of your devices. 

Old best practices recommend that you change your passwords frequently. However, this leads to people forgetting them more easily. Therefore, choosing complexity over frequency is the best way to keep your security guaranteed. 

We hope all of this festive cheer and advice is useful and can be used to ensure you get presents and not coal in the company stocking this year! 

Check back next week for another tip!  And don’t forget to spread the word on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram for your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card! 

To Enter

1.       Read our blog post (Yea!  You have already done this!)

2.       Like our post on one of our social platforms

3.       Follow our page on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram

4.       Tag 2 peers in the comments

Bonus points if you share!!  The winner will be announced on January 4, 2022.