Happy Holidays!
I’ve got a geeky suggestion for one of your 2017 New Year’s resolutions: Make a commitment to change all your online passwords to something unique and complex.
“Oh, what a pain!” you may say. And yes, it is. But it just may save you from an even more painful hack of your account.
Weak Password, Easier Hack
Cybercrooks take advantage of weak passwords to hack a variety of accounts from email to banking to social networking sites. And if they hack a vault of online passwords that includes one of your accounts, you are vulnerable even if you have a strong password. (But as long as that compromised password is unique, the creeps won’t be able to access your other accounts.)
So, to reduce the risk of making your accounts an easy exploit, do these two things:
1. Make sure each password you have is unique, that is, don’t use the same password for any two or more accounts. The password for each of your email accounts, your computer login, your phone, tablet, social networking accounts, financial accounts, etc. should be exclusive.
2. Make each password complex. I recommend at least 12 characters, with a mix of letters, numbers, and characters like # or * o ^. You can also use a phrase as a password, such as Ilovemilkandcookies. But make the “I’ a “1”, the “m” in milk an “M” and the “s” in cookies a “$”. You can also use a random password generator, like the one at this site:
https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm. (In this case, you can just pick out the number of characters you’d like to use, such as 8, 10, or 12 from the character string.)
Password vault
How to keep track of your new, brain-boggling password system? Use a password manager like lastpass.com.
For heaven’s sake do not keep the passwords on your phone in a notes file. If someone breaks into your phone, it’s game over. They will "own" you.
If you’re old school, you can type or write the passwords on paper, then store in a locked safe or very safe place. Share the location with a trusted person. (If you want to up your game, you can also encrypt the file on your computer containing your password list.)
Break down the job
This password management task may seem daunting. So in the New Year (or earlier for you fast starters) just commit to changing one password each week, starting with your online financial accounts.
Wishing you safe computing this holiday season and in 2017.
Thanks for reading.
Sam
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