The internet is becoming more and more vital in everyday life, and whether you like it or not, it’s becoming almost unavoidable not to have online accounts for banking, shopping and everyday admin. In fact, recent figures show that 77% of adults in the UK now shop online and 63% use internet bankingⁱ.

As online accounts increase, it’s estimated that the average internet user now has 26 passwords to remember making it increasingly difficult to remember them all. It is important however, to ensure that you are not consistently using the same passwords, and that you make your passwords difficult to hack.

Top tips to secure your password

To help you minimise the potential risk of hackers, our IT Risk Management team have some useful tips to make your password as safe as possible:

1. Use different passwords for all online accounts you enrol with. This way, should one of your accounts be compromised, none of your other accounts will be
2. Consider using passphrases rather than passwords as they are less likely to be broken by brute force. A passphrase, for example, would be three random words with four or more letters i.e. “H0rseRainb0wPaul”

Paragon Bank’s security measures

To ensure we offer the highest security measures for our customers, we have put in to place certain processes.

1. Usernames – to ensure that accounts are as secure as possible, we assign a username to each customer which is randomly generated and confirmed in writing to the account holders home address and not shared electronically
2. Passwords – the more complex the password, the more difficult it is to hack, and therefore, when choosing your account password, it must contain at least one number and contain between 8 and 20 characters
3. Security information – to make it easy to identify customers, we ask for memorable details and security questions. This is so we can verify customers should password information be forgotten

These steps can be both inconvenient and time consuming, but customer security is a priority for us and they can help with protecting accounts.

What are the 10 most common passwords?

Using numbers and symbols in your passwords can help increase their strength, but you still need to remember that using generic sequences can be just as easy to hack.

You might be surprised to see the simplicity of the top 10 most common passwords:ⁱⁱ

1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. qwerty
4. 12345678
5. 111111
6. 1234567890
7. 1234567
8. password
9. 123123
10. 987654321

Although these passwords will be easy for the account holder to remember and therefore reduce the likelihood of having to be regularly reset, they aren’t secure.

For more information on password security, take a look at this recent article from The Telegraph.

ⁱ_{The Office for National Statistics}
ⁱⁱ_{The world's most common passwords revealed: Are you using them? - The Telegraph}