Passwords: How To Choose Them Wisely

Posted by admin in Security Best Practices on 12 7th, 2009 | no responses

Are you making yourself a target for fraud? A lot of and more typically I’m hearing stories of people who have had their accounts hacked. They need had money stolen, lost sleep, spent hours putting in place new accounts, or had their credit ruined. Don’t let this happen to you.

Are you making these dangerous mistakes?

Mistake #one: Using the identical password for all your accounts.

Please don’t do this. Use totally different passwords for every email account, and undoubtedly use distinctive passwords for shopping websites where you’d enter your credit card.

Mistake #two: Short passwords

The chance of somebody guessing your password is increasingly tough the more characters are in it. So, select the gusto and make your passwords long.

Mistake #three: BradPitt, Charlie, Sarah, Princess, Barbie, Gandolf — Did I guess it however?

Do not use kids’ names, pet’s name, nicknames, names from characters in books or movies or celebrity names. Even if I did not guess it in my list, someone who knows you could.

Mistake #four: Straightforward to remember English words

Easy to recollect is additionally straightforward to guess. Passwords should not contain English words found during a dictionary. Non-English words or any words in any dictionary are a high risk as well. And, for goodness sakes, if your password is “password” or “test” then it’s a wonder you haven’t been hacked nevertheless!

Mistake #5: Numbers are no-no’s.

Seriously, keep off from birthdays, anniversaries, addresses, social security numbers or telephone numbers. They are all too simple to guess.

Select random passwords for banking sites like PayPal. Combine letters (both uppercase and lowercase) and numbers.

If all of this sounds too onerous to recollect, then contemplate employing a Password program. Most of the good password programs can not solely store your passwords on your computer, however they’ll generate utterly random passwords when you need one.

Here are a few to try.

http://www.fgroupsoft.com/Traysafe/

http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.web/

http://www.treepad.com/treepadsafe/

It’s never a smart time to search out out that someone has stolen money from you — or locked you out of your own email account. It’s a waste of some time and money. Please protect yourself.