Experts gave tips on how to securely store information and create passwords.
To protect your accounts, it is important not only to come up with complex combinations, but also to store them correctly. By World Password Day, which is celebrated on May 1, Kaspersky Lab, Mail Mail and Sberbank Health told Izvestia how to safely and efficiently create and store account login data.
According to the results of a survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab, the majority of Russians periodically forget their passwords from various services and access to their accounts has to be restored. This happens regularly or frequently in 16% of respondents, sometimes in 37%, rarely in 35%. Experts noted that this approach to storing credentials not only makes it difficult to use accounts, but also poses cybersecurity risks.
"To understand why a person remembers some things quickly and others not, you need to know how memory works. It has the property of selectivity. If information is used infrequently and efforts need to be made to memorize it, then this is a difficult task for the brain," explained Maxim Pankov, a neurologist at the Sberbank Health medical company.
He also clarified that forgetting performs valuable and vital functions for health. In particular, it participates in the regulation of emotions, limiting access to negative memories, as well as in information processing, regulating the relevance of knowledge and ensuring its timeliness and updating.
"In general, a person remembers information better that has personal or survival significance, an emotional component that is often repeated, and if there are associations between new data and existing knowledge," he added.
In turn, Dmitry Galov, head of Kaspersky GReAT in Russia, stressed that it is important not to write down account access information on a piece of paper or take screenshots on your phone, but to use password managers. Such solutions will eliminate the need to keep in mind a lot of combinations of letters and numbers and streamline work with them. According to him, in this case, you will need to create and remember only one complex master password to access your account in the application.
"As for password recovery, there are certain rules. Do not use words or numbers that directly answer the test question. If you specify your favorite color as a hint, then it should be, for example, "apple", not "green", it only remains to find the right association," he said.
Pankov called this associative method an effective way of remembering. At the same time, the association should be unobvious to everyone and understandable only to one person — the one who creates the password.
"Many people have good visual memory, so when memorizing information, you can "photograph" it, visually imagine it. For those who perceive information better by ear, it is worth trying to record the data for memorization on a dictaphone and then turn on the recording several times," the doctor advised.
Dmitry Vodyanoi, head of the Mail's information security team, noted that it is also important to implement additional levels of protection. For example, you can enable two-factor authentication, which requires entering an additional code sent to your mobile device, or use a password-free authorization method.
"It can be based on biometric data, one-time codes or web tokens and is becoming increasingly popular due to its high security and convenience. Its main advantage is that there is no need to memorize combinations. Therefore, we can say that in the future this type of authorization will even be able to replace traditional passwords," the expert concluded.
Earlier, on April 11, it was reported that 86% of Russians surveyed are anxious about modern technology. This is stated in the results of a study by the IT company Cyberprotect and the business social network TenChat. The biggest concern is the threat of account hacking, as stated by 32% of respondents. At the same time, 30% are worried about a possible data leak from biometric systems.
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