Our first daily topic for Cyber Scotland Week 2019 is Passwords. For many people, passwords are a necessary evil of using devices and online services – everything seems to want you to set one, has a different idea about how long or complex passwords should be and wants you to change it all too often – even though you’ve only just managed to successfully remember your current password!

Although there are some promising developments that may start to reduce the number of passwords we each need to remember – for example Microsoft is adding features to make Windows 10 passwordless – passwords will unfortunately remain part of our lives for the foreseeable future. Cyber criminals know this too – that’s why they continue to target individuals and their passwords, particularly since a shift to more secure devices and automatic updates makes attacking the software directly less appealing to them.

To help you cope with password overload, we’ve put together some guidance covering the most important points: why it’s important to keep your passwords secret, why you should change them when you suspect they may no longer be safe, why reusing a single password in multiple places is dangerous, why certain passwords are less secure than others and why the advice we give you about passwords changes from time to time.

As always, if you have any questions about passwords – or any other aspect of Information Security – please get in touch. Tomorrow’s topic is Email Safety, we look forward to welcoming you back on Wednesday!