Archive for December 3rd, 2008

Passwords

Author: Steve Martin

If you are anything like me, you have dozens of different web sites that you are required to log into in order to access information. These may include your e-mail accounts, shopping web sites, banking web sites, credit card web sites, school sites, even blogging requires a password to get in and write new posts. These sites require passwords for good reason. You wouldn’t want someone jumping into your Amazon account and buying lots of stuff on your card would you? Or, think about the headaches of someone getting into your banking account. I know some people personally that have had people get into their ebay account and change pricing on their listed auctions.

You may have noticed my post (two before this one) called “Protected: Highly Confidential (Password Protected Post)“. Well, I guess I have some pretty curious siblings because two of them decided they were going to “hack” into that post (and they were successful). I don’t really care who gets into that post which is why I gave it a VERY simple “password”. But, it brings about the question of how important secure passwords are. Think about the password (s) you use for the various sites you visit. Are they just a single word? Not good as any dictionary tool could crack it. Are any of your passwords just a important date? Not good as anyone that knows you probably knows any important dates in your life or could easily find them out. Does your password contain letters AND numbers? Better. At a minimum, I would suggest using letters and numbers. You may want to throw in some unusual characters like % or & or #. Make your passwords at least 8 characters in length. The idea is to make it VERY difficult for anyone to guess.

So, if you have easy to guess passwords, I would suggest you start changing them to something a bit more difficult to guess…..because my siblings are on the loose and may hack in at any time.