#WeekendWisdom 015 Do you have a unique password
Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 15. This week I’m going to ask “Do you have a unique password?”
How do I find out
Last week we talked about “HaveIBeenPwned.com“, the service run by the gentleman called Troy Hunt. This has details of all the data breaches that he has become aware of over the last few years.
In some of those data breaches, there have been up to a half a billion passwords included in some of those data breaches.
So Troy has provided a feature on his site to be able to search if you have a password that is in one of those breaches and how many times has this occurred. So this will show you how unique your password is.
You’re right to be sceptical
Now you might be sceptical and say I’m not going to type in my password on this website. I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t believe it’s secure and you can check here to see what he uses to keep your passwords anonymised. You can take a look there and he explains all about it. I will leave you to read through that yourself.
And if you’re still not convinced you can go down to the bottom of the page and he has provided downloadable links to the files for all these passwords. So you can use them to search yourself. Now you will need to use some technical skills to be able to search those files.
So do you have a unique password?
But if you type in your password into the search field and it comes up saying not found. You know, great! You have a very unique password. It hasn’t been exposed in any of those data breaches.
But if you have a poor password which, unfortunately a lot of people do, you can find out how many other times it has been exposed. Sometimes there are passwords that have more exposure than others. So even still even at low numbers if you have your password, if it’s not unique you really should consider changing it to something unique.
So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.