• ‘Randomness.’ As mentioned, the entropy of each symbol increases the strength of a password. The more random your password is, the harder it is to crack.
• A mixture of characters. So, symbols, numbers, letters; and try not to do these in any orders.
• A long password, in fact, the longer the better.
• Don’t use common phrases or words, especially ones that are personal to you. That means no birthdays, no names, and no pets.
• Keep passwords to yourself! No sharing passwords and try not to store passwords in plain text anywhere, especially not next to your computer.
• Use a password manager, no one expects you to remember all of your passwords when they are that ‘complex’. Devices often now encourage you to use a complicated password generator, so you don’t have to come up with them yourself, but thankfully, there will be a place on your device which stores them securely for you to refer back to.

Password Advice For Organisations

The best advice for organisations when considering network security, is to assume the threat is already inside. Embrace a zero-trust approach and ensure that, any user or device that wants to connect to a resource must re-establish trust before access is granted.
The approach will combat the increased threat from shifts in modern day working such as further cloud adoption, mobile application usage and remote working, all of which can be contributors to credential theft, feeding the rise in privilege access as an attack vector.