It’s a wise idea to follow the calendar year when changing passwords to your online sites, financial and banking sites and computer systems. We recommend that you change these passwords at least once every three months. It’s also important that you don’t reuse passwords or use the same passwords for two different resources.
If your social media account gets hacked, you don’t want the attacker to also be able to gain access to your Amazon.com and banking accounts simply because you used the same password for those sites. Maintaining separate passwords is a lot of work, but the cybersociety we live in demands it.
A good password will be composed of both lowercase and CAPITAL letters, numbers and !@#$%^ (symbols). The passwords for your various sites should always be different, but they can be similar. You may use J@nu@ry1! for site A and J@nu@ry1@ for site B.
Alan Edwards, CISM, is chief information officer at Computerware, Inc., in Vienna, Virginia.
