How to survive attacks that result in password leaks?

We speak about attacks on online providers that result in the leak of personal users’ passwords. Just recently we saw the leak of 6.46 million Linkedin user passwordss. Right after this we saw a leak of 400 thousand Yahoo Voices passwords. These are not isolated cases; nowadays we see many successful attacks that lead to personal data leaks. One more example of this is the leak of personal information of users of one of the popular Android forums and finally the hack of the NVIDIA developer forum. It’s worth saying that many successful attacks are just not announced and the Internet community doesn’t find out about them.

So, how do we deal with cases when our passwords can be leaked? Obviously the end user can’t do much to protect his on-line service provider and prevent the leak, but there are some basic tips on how to avoid a big disaster when our passwords are compromised.

1. Use a different password for each different online resource. Never reuse the same password for different
   services. If you do, all or many of your other online accounts can be compromised.
2. Use complex passwords. This means, in a perfect scenario, a combination of symbols, letters and special characters.
   The longer the better.
3. Sometimes our online service providers don’t let us create really complex passwords, but try to use long passwords, with at least 23 characters in a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters. A password of 23 characters (131 bits) would be ok.

For some users it’s hard to remember complex passwords, in which case a good solution would be to use a password manager like Kaspersky Password Manager.

Remember, you can’t stop your service provider being hacked, but you can avoid a bigger disaster when all of your accounts get compromised at once just because you used the same password!