According to a recent report by Science Daily, the thing that makes it easy to remember passwords, like words and phrases, also makes it easy for cyber criminals to crack. So passwords remain a most significant vulnerability because we choose relatively weak passwords that are easy to remember.
Let’s face it.
Remembering unique identifiers for every type of on line account from finance to health care and social media poses a challenge.
Bryon Patterson is a computer technology expert at APlus Computer in Sacramento. “Stay away from using actual words in your password,” Patterson said. “Actual words can be cracked pretty quickly by the hackers, so you need a password of numbers, letters and characters that are randomly spelled.”
Patterson suggests that keeping track of the random assemblies of characters, letters and numbers can be done in a secure way with a password “wallet” which can be downloaded, usually for free. One such application he recommends is KeePass, which enables you to maintain a list of unique passwords, and lock them into the encrypted list with one password to remember. “Make sure you don’t forget that password,” Patterson said.
Kim Kommando suggests a random character set that is the same at the core, and then changes as the beginning and the end for each account, or come up with a phrase from a song and use the first letters of each word in the phrase to assemble the password.
And the FBI continues to advise folks to never give up personal information and password data to anyone, no matter how official the email or inquiry appears, as this is still a way that cyber criminals gain access to personal accounts.
It has been reported that Google is working on technology to replace passwords in the form of a USB port or some other form of hardware that would provide authentication.
Perhaps “password” is no longer an appropriate term for the secure authentication measures we need.
Rather “pass code” is more apropos.
Parent Resources
- Banana Moments: Help for Parenting in the Network Culture
- Parental authority in the network
- A+ Computer Repair
- CyberParenting Topics on The Fish 103.9FM Tuesdays
- Follow Joanna @CyberParenting
- Like Banana Moments
- Like Three Moms and a Mike
(Ref: 815-e)
Comments