Security Insights: what actions to take

Windows, Mac

To enhance your digital security, we've introduced three severity labels in our Security Insights feature: Critical, High, and Medium. These labels help you identify and prioritize password vulnerabilities, guiding you on which issues to address immediately and which can be resolved later.

Security experts recommend that passwords should be 20 or more random characters. Use Sticky Password’s password generator to create your strong passwords!

Critical Issues

Items included in this category are your strong passwords and login/password pairs found on the Dark Web.

Take action immediately and change these passwords! You may also want to contact the account provider to find out more about the breach and the steps they have taken to protect clients like you.

When your strong, unique passwords or your login/password pairs are found on the Dark Web, it is a strong signal of a security risk to you: bad actors may be attempting to use your login credentials for their own personal gain – and your loss!

High-severity issues

Items included in this category are your weak and re-used passwords found on the Dark Web.

Change the passwords below as soon as you can to protect yourself against password spraying and other threats used by hackers.

💡 Did you know that: when you use weak passwords your online accounts are at risk even if your login/ password pair wasn’t found in breached data, yet? Today’s computing technology enables hackers to try millions of logins in seconds — thereby creating a very real risk to you through attacks like ‘password spraying’.

Password spraying is like a thief trying a few master keys on many different houses. In this cyber attack, attackers use a selection of common and leaked passwords from the Dark Web to access multiple user accounts across various websites and services. This method is different and sneakier than attacks that try many keys on one lock (known as brute force attack), which websites can easily catch and block. By using fewer passwords on more accounts, password spraying doesn’t trigger alarms as quickly, making it a stealthy threat for regular users.

Medium issues

These are your weak and re-used passwords.

Using weak passwords, or reusing passwords on multiple sites is a significant risk to your online security. That’s why random passwords created by a password generator, like Sticky Password’s random password generator are so useful.

💡 Did you know that: hackers have long lists of bad (weak) passwords that they use to try to force their way into your accounts? Weak passwords can be dictionary words, or frequently used strings like 123456, qwerty, letmein and similar things that people use to make it easy on themselves when prompted to make a password for a new web account. Of course, short passwords are weak by definition.

And remember, just because you are using a string or word for the first time, doesn’t mean that thousands of people around the internet aren’t using the word ‘manchesterunited’ too!

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