My mother used to say, “How many times do I have to tell you?” George Santayanna mused, “Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." We’ve talked about it before but events the last couple of weeks would seem to inspire a repeat. The word for the week is passwords. Why do we use passwords? Passwords are used to prevent unauthorized people from accessing data that could be used to harm us. Either financially or our reputations.
Consider this report by the Guardian, 61% of us use the same password for all of our secured accounts. Banks, brokerages, email accounts, music buying accounts etc. One password gives an intruder full rein over our lives. With that said, don’t feel that it is necessary to live in a constant state of fear. The Internet’s benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, especially when they can be mitigated by using a little common sense.
Here’s another little known fact. According to PCmagazine, the top ten passwords in the world are, password, 123456, qwerty, abc123, letmein, monkey, myspace1, password1, link182, (your first name). If your password is on that list it needs to be changed now. Hackers will look at your email address; this tells them what domain you belong to. For example, if your email is 123@aol.com then they know that you have an account at AOL and if they go to the AOL home page and type in your email in the sign in field, they are confident that a very high percentage of the time, one of the above passwords will get them into your account. Once in they can, as they did to a friend of mine, notify everyone in the address book that you are in desperate need of money and please send some to an address in Nigeria by wire transfer. Or they can send an email that touts some bogus website that supposedly you visited and were simply wowed.
Facebook and Linkedin are great social networking sites that allow us to keep our friends and family up to speed on our comings and going. But if someone guesses our password and accesses our social network site, all kinds of things, good, bad, true or not can be posted by someone with an agenda. Worse yet, if that nefarious character changes our password to a tough password that we can’t guess, it will take an extraordinary effort to even close the account much less wrestle it back to our control.
It’s probably not critical that we have strong passwords for low level accounts. Certain blogs or sites where we function under an avatar or screen name or sites like online newspapers where a breach would not bankrupt us, but when it comes to banks, insurance and bill paying sites STRONG needs to be our mantra. What makes up a strong password? First forget about dictionary words. Hackers have software programs that can try every word in the dictionary in a matter of minutes. Children’s names, birth dates, anniversary dates etc can all be tried in seconds. Here are some simple tips. Longer is better, random sequences, characters and numbers mixed in with some symbols like # or ^, increase the difficulty of cracking a password by magnitudes of order.
What’s your favorite phrase? Take out the spaces, leave out a word, throw in a few misspellings and the makings of a great password arise. Remember, just because a site says to create a password with a minimum of six characters, doesn’t mean that we have to stop at six. Try using our weight followed by a # sign and followed up with a misspelled word that means something to us like misteak. (Martha, that reminds me of dinner.)
According to Microsoft, it's not necessarily bad to write passwords down - a piece of paper is going to be much harder to hack for an internet crook than something stored on your computer or online, as long as it is adequately protected. Hide it, disguise it, put spaces in it and blend it in with other things. And don't write "My banking passwords" at the top of the page.
Not sure how secure your password is? Surf over to www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx where Microsoft provides an online password checker. Type in a password you use or are thinking of using and a progress bar appears to indicate the strength of the password. Try some of yours, you might be surprised.
Be safe out there.
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