Passwords are the first line of defense against unauthorized access to your devices, accounts, and personal information. The stronger your password is, the more protected your information will be from hackers and malicious software. You should maintain strong passwords for all accounts to avoid the exploitation of your personal information and prevent any type of unauthorized access to your accounts or devices.

Password strength can be determined by different characteristics and also created in multiple ways to ensure its strength.

A more detailed post regarding the characteristics of a strong password can be found here.

The amount of time the average person spends online is constantly increasing. There are a plethora of tasks and activities that we do online; banking, shopping, TV viewing, chatting with friends, and studying -- to name a few. People carry out these actions online on a daily basis, and there is always something new, just around the corner, which will drag us back to our PCs or Smart Phone again and again.

Most passwords are very simple, which makes them vulnerable to having their accounts hacked and personal information at risk. We can assume that an average person has around 20 online accounts, but people tend to use only 5 passwords for all of them, to make it easier to remember. Also, a huge number of people still use basic passwords (such as, ‘qwerty’, ‘1234’, or ‘password’), which is an open invitation for hackers to exploit.

People often convince themselves that their passwords and logins are stored on their computer which is safe from being hacked because it is behind a wireless router or firewall device. However, most people don’t bother to change the default password on this device, so a hacker could easily park outside your home or office, and use a laptop to run through a list of default passwords until they gain access to your network. It is vital that strong passwords are used for your router or firewall devices. The last thing you want is for a hacker to gain control of your whole network and all of the devices within it.

Something else to keep in mind is that some passwords that you think are insignificant might actually make you extremely vulnerable if a hacker cracks them. For example, some people think that their email password is not important, because they “don’t receive anything of a sensitive nature.” In reality, their email address is probably connected to their online banking account. If a hacker obtains access to your email account, they could log into the Bank’s website and click the “Forgotten Password” link, which will then email a new password link to the email account the hacker now has access to.  They can now access your bank account, too. For this reason, people should create and protect their passwords with care.

Having a strong password will definitely increase account security as it serves as the first line of defense and could stop some types of attacks to some extent, I would recommend having strong passwords and periodically changing them in order to remove any sort of vulnerability.