Password food for thought:

• 30% of Canadians don’t use complex passwords (Get Cybersafe)
• 41% use the same password across multiple accounts (Get Cybersafe)
• 9 out of 10 of the top passwords in Canada can be cracked in less than 1 second (NordPass)

Maybe you’ve met a password like ‘PhoneChicCool’ before. According to today’s password standards, what matters most is password length and its uniqueness. A password like ‘PhoneChicCool’ is easy to remember, hard to guess and take decades to crack.

And with more accounts and more passwords to remember, suddenly, your digital world has hundreds of accounts. Can you remember hundreds of unique passwords without relying on a sticky note list or random computer file that anyone could find? 

Today’s attackers are running industry-scale operations that buy and test stolen passwords from old breaches an automating non-stop login attempts on many accounts at once. It’s called credential stuffing, and it’s how many compromised accounts actually start.

If you reuse passwords, you are at higher risk. Reusing a password is like giving a criminal a handful of your keys and saying, ‘find out which one unlocks my house door’.

Your best defence? Not necessarily more complex passwords, but better tools to manage them.

Quick tip

Use websites like monitor.mozilla.org or haveibeenpwned.com to verify whether your email address or password has been involved in a data breach.

The solution: One strong master password to rule them all!

A password manager can securely store and autofill your passwords for every online account. You only need to remember one strong master password (like ‘CoolChicPhone’), then the password manager can create and protect the rest. It can:

• Generate unique, complex passwords for every site/account
• Keeps your passwords in a secure digital vault accessible by a single secure password
• Instantly enters your passwords when you need them
• Works seamlessly across your devices

Think of it as your keychain behind a vault door. Organized, secure, and available. Using a password manager makes hacking your account much more difficult, because every login is different and strong. Less stress and less risk.