More than 12,000 accounts had passwords with variations of the date and season, such as October17 or Summer17; 6,827 had “123” somewhere in the password; and over 5,000 had different versions of the word “password”.
It is difficult to believe that in August 2018, this type of thing still happens – but then again, perhaps the majority of government employees went through school at a time when the words ‘digital citizenship’ and ‘digital security’ were NOT in everyday use!
Over two years ago, I wrote a blog post about password security, highlighting the use of KeePass, an open source, offline password manager which makes having a different, secure password for every online account easy to manage.
You can use KeePass to generate a random secure string, or you can create your own, memorable password that is strong using the XKCD method which I included in the previous post, and have reposted here:
Password strength is something that should be taught to every student. Using passwords is a day to day action for almost everyone, as we conduct our personal business and banking, communicate with friends, family and work colleagues via email and log into any number of social media accounts and learning management systems on a daily basis.
To encourage the practice of creating strong passwords, I have created a series of posters; use one, use them all or be inspired and create your own to meet the needs and interests of your students/clients. I have included images of the posters below, but click on the links below each poster to access a high quality PDF file more suitable for printing.
Enjoy! If you do use these posters or similar, let me know – I’d love to hear how they are being used, and what your school or place of employment does to create awareness around data security and passwords.
Download a high quality PDF version of this A4 poster by clicking here.
Download a high quality PDF version of this A4 poster by clicking here.
Download a high quality PDF version of this A4 poster by clicking here.
