Updated on May 4, 2023. No, you should not use the same password for everything. Security experts recommend using strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts to protect against common cyberattacks.
Almost two-thirds of people use the same password across multiple accounts.
Don't use the same password for each account.
If someone discovers your password for one account, all of your other accounts will be vulnerable. Try to include numbers, symbols, and both uppercase and lowercase letters. Avoid using words that can be found in the dictionary.
Whatever your reason for doing it, reusing passwords is a practice best left behind. If accounts are compromised, cybercriminals can do a great deal of damage, such as committing identity theft, or stealing money and sensitive information from your place of work.
A good password should, first and foremost, be an original one. It's all too easy to simply use the same password for multiple sites and services – after all, you're more likely to remember it, especially if you're managing the average 100 passwords.
Using the same password leaves you and your information vulnerable to financial and identity theft Identity theftThe crime of impersonating someone and using their private information, usually for financial gain. , so it's important to use a unique one for each of your accounts.
? 51% of people use the same password for both personal and work accounts*. Although this makes them easier to remember, it leaves users much more vulnerable to hackers - if they can gain access to one account, they can get into all of them.
But how often should you create new passwords? Cybersecurity experts recommend changing your password every three months. There may even be situations where you should change your password immediately, especially if a cybercriminal has access to your account.
Best practices
Set Enforce password history to 24. This setting will help mitigate vulnerabilities that are caused by password reuse. Set Maximum password age to expire passwords between 60 and 90 days. Try to expire the passwords between major business cycles to prevent work loss.
Using the same passwords allows malicious agents to access those accounts with a single source of characters, leading to fraudulent and phishing attacks.
Passwords aren't secure
Passwords can be shared, guessed or stolen, which means they aren't secure. Over 50% of young people admit that they share their log-in details with friends, and 59% of respondents admitted to reusing the same passwords across multiple sites.
As a working professional, you likely have numerous passwords to keep track of, and using the same password across multiple sites can be tempting. However, doing so can be a significant security risk because if one of your accounts is compromised, hackers may be able to access all your accounts using the same password.
“guest” beat out “123456” to be the most popular password among Americans in 2022. Simple combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols, such as “a1b2c3,” “abc123,” or “qwerty,” are highly popular in the US.
The 20-bit password is half as hard to crack as a password with 21 bits. A password with 20 bits of entropy is drawn uniformly and randomly from 2²⁰ possible distinct passwords. That's just over 1 million, and approximately the strength you would get from a 4-character generated password.
Also, never use an understandable word (“Dolphin”) or expression (“ILoveYou” or “Ferrari”) : Hackers' cracking tools are designed to recognize them. Instead, pick random expressions, combine them with uppercase and lowercase letters, and special symbols such as @ and numbers to create a complex password.
Multiple Accounts Can Be Compromised
Reusing passwords makes it possible for a malicious agent to hack into an account to have access to others belonging to the same user. And the more a password is reused, the greater the risk of having the credentials breached.
Changing your passwords may not mitigate all the damage from malware or a successful phishing expedition. Still, it can keep future attackers or scammers from accessing your accounts or impersonating you further.
Passwords set to never expire can be a security vulnerability for your network. Some regulatory bodies require passwords to expire every 90 days, while others recommend setting passwords to never expire – as long as other protocols are in place.
Q1: Which of the following three is the strongest password? A: The correct answer is 3. This is a random password and thus the most secure one of the 3. starwars is not random and a commonly used password.
Some of the password storage best practice policies that companies use include: Requiring that passwords contain a mixture of lowercase and uppercase characters. Passwords need to be a certain length. Passwords need to contain a mixture of lowercase, uppercase, numbers and special characters.
Fact #2: 59% of people use the same password everywhere
91 % of people know that password recycling poses enormous security risks. Yet 59% still use the same password everywhere. Therefore, if a cyber criminal was to crack one of your passwords, they would be able to access all of your other accounts.
When sharing your password with someone else, you risk granting that individual access to every account you own with the same password — and probably even those with similar passwords. If one of these passwords is for a social media platform, an angry colleague could change your profile picture to embarrass you.