JASE Digital Media blog

I Have Your Password - Who Else Has Your Password?

This is a post from guest blogger Anthony Gartner of Computer-Net Solutions. Computer-Net Solutions is an IT Services provider for small businesses.

How many passwords do you have?
Does someone have your password?
How do you protect yourself from this?

Passwords are a big deal!!!  They control access to everything in our lives.  This means we should be as secure about our passwords as possible.  Most people have a tendency to have a low, medium, and high security password.  This is a great theory, but a very misguided thought process.  Computers have a lot of horsepower now and the time to break a password is trivial.  Add to this that Google will tend to have a LOT of information about you, makes passwords easy to guess.

Example: a child’s name password
Low - ben
Med - Ben72
High - @Ben1972!

All of these passwords are valid.  The question is, where did you use these passwords?  If you use them on a network that is not secure, or a service such as POP email, then you may not be the only person that has these passwords.

Human nature is to keep passwords simple. But in a world of computers, simple passwords don’t help.  The other trait of people is to have a password we can remember. If it is too hard to remember we simply write it down and leave it on our desk.  Well people will look at your desk and see your password taped to the monitor and now have access to your data.

There are several ways to fix this:

1. Never reuse your passwords (there are programs that will make every combination of passwords available from your lowest level password).
2. Keep passwords in a secure location.
3. A recommended method of the above solutions is to use something like lastpass.com’s password manager from http://lastpass.com. The free or premium both work well.  Another great product is Keepass from http://keepass.com.

The advantage of these products is that they will give you a random password and the ability to both store it as well as simplify the logon process by putting in your logon and password and you only need to remember 1 password.  Which you wont’ give out!!!

Happy and Safe Surfing!!!!

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Tags: Anthony Gartner, Computer-Net Solutions, hacker, Keepass, Lastpass, password security