Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 27 | Page 26

EDITOR’S QUESTION I suggest that you keep it unique to you. Identify with the platform and add in something from your list of favourite things, a phrase or a lyric. Let me give you an example to get the mind working. If you associate Facebook with school friends and family, use an incident at high school that you associate with and a family joke name then add a lyric from a song. It will be a long password, pretty much impossible to guess. You should remember this and giggle every time you log in. Make sure your passwords are unique before you are compromised. A great password is worth the effort. Remember that your passwords should be treated like your underwear – they are personal, shouldn’t be shared and they must be changed regularly. For additional security, one should add two- factor authentication to any account that supports it. This means one will have to enter both a password and a code that’s emailed or texted in order to log on. This will certainly prevent hackers from accessing an account even when they have the password. www.intelligentcio.com