Don’t repeat passwords

This is one of the most important points. Most of the employees tend to reuse a password frequently on multiple platforms both professionally and personally which helps them simplify things, but these minor things can turn out to be a major security breach.  Simple and reusing passwords can be easily accessed.  The recent Zappos case where the external customer passwords were exposed can be apt example by Slain.  It so happens that some of the twitter and social networking passwords turn out to be passwords of bank accounts, customer databases, health database and other critical information.  It is always recommended that passwords should never be reused for sensitive applications like financial information, critical health data etc.

Change passwords frequently

This is where most of us take a back seat, changing password is as much important as the information we try to secure. Many users create a password and just keep it untouched and unchanged for ages, if this is the case the then the users who are unaware of the seriousness involved may land up their company in big undesirable circumstances. Slain suggests that a password should be updated every 60 days or better every 30 days. Changing your virtual lock regularly minimizes risk. A unique password should always be used which avoids leakage and hacking of secure data.

Use Complex Passwords

The fact that passwords can be forgotten easily makes most of us create a simple obvious password.  Complex passwords should be case sensitive heterogeneous co-ordination of numbers, alphabets and special characters which should atleast sum upto 8 letters. Complex passwords can be easily forgotten therefore slain suggests using memorable phrases with special characters, spaces and numbers in between the phrase. "Those can create pretty robust passwords that are a lot easier to remember," Slain said.