Password Hygiene
A Journey of a Thousand Files
Salutations! Nii here. I am going to ta-
talk about how to practice good password hygi-
Okay okay fine… I’ll address the elephant in the room; IT HAS BEEN OVER A YEAR AND MANCHESTER UNITED FOOTBALL CLUB ESTABLISHMENT INCORPORATED LIMITED ARE STILL BAD AT FOOTBALL. How is that even possible?😭
I don’t know what to tell you to be perfectly honest with you. This club is after me.
Moving on from the ONLY elephant in the room that needed to be addressed…👀, lets get right into today’s article.
As we established earlier in a previous article, passwords have become part and parcel of our technological lives. Passwords are typically the first line of defence and authentication. It is important that the passwords we set are hard for attackers to figure out and use as much as is reasonable; good password hygiene if you will. Let us dive into some good password hygiene tips.
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To make it easy to follow, I am going to take a very weak password and then build it into a good one as we go. The current password is Bread. Now you would agree with me that this is a terrible password to use in its current state. Let’s see how we can make it better.
1. Length: It is recommended that your password be at least 16 characters in length. Longer passwords take longer to crack, thus reducing the incentive for attackers to do so.
Updated password: Breadddddddddddd
2. Complexity: Passwords should have an amalgamation of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. This, along with the length, further increases the time required to crack the password.
Updated password: Breadislife!12345
3. Randomness: Passwords should be a random set of characters with no dictionary words, predictable patterns, personal information or typical keyboard sequences. Adding this to what was done previously also makes it more difficult for attackers to brute force your password i.e. trying every possible character combination till the target’s password is found.
Updated password: Bo9pLe4fi*v6w2
4. Uniqueness: At this stage, the password is really good to use (don’t use this one in particular please😂). However, we are in an era where data breaches have become widespread. One bad habit that has befallen a lot of us is the reuse of passwords. Attackers know this and will try using a discovered password on multitudes of other sites. Let us endeavour to use one password per site. This reduces how much one breached password affects your security posture.
One question you may have is how often should you change your password? The answer to this is quite tricky. There was a general consensus that changing passwords using a 60 to 90 day interval was good practice. However, it is generally not advised as much nowadays. As at 2025, it was advised by entities such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (Section 3.1.1.2) that a password should only be changed when there is evidence of a breach. The passwords should be strong, kept in a password manager and supported with strong Multi-Factor Authentication. The thinking behind this is that people who had to change passwords regularly had a tendency to create weak passwords that usually deviated from the original password they used. For example, changing from “Unitedwhy?1” to “Unitedwhy?2” (Lord help me). This advice is tailored towards a more company-based setting where there is a dedicated IT/cybersecurity team in place. Most people will not go out of their way to check if a service/platform/website etc has been breached. This can make this a bit more impractical for a regular user. Ultimately, it is up to you. What you need to make sure of is that you are following good password hygiene, possibly consider using a password manager (I have already written about this) and make sure you use strong Multi-Factor Authentication.
That’s it for today’s article on password hygiene. My friend called me out that I said I would write about this in my article on password managers so here you go, and shout out to you when you read this😂. Till next time…
queue the outro
