Most password-cracking doesn’t happen the way it’s portrayed in movies, where Our Hero (or The Villain) sits at a keyboard, tries a phrase or two, rubs his chin, then spies a childhood photo on the desk. Odds are, most people trying to crack your passwords don’t know you. However, an obscure password only protects you from people who know something about you. Yes, obscure can work-and it’s a darn sight better than picking an obvious password. This evergreen advice often gets interpreted to mean that passwords should be obscure, or a term no one would ever think you’d pick if they had a million years. Similarly, password makes a singularly poor password - as do all other commonly-used throwaway passwords. Most tech-savvy people agree no one should use details about themselves as a password: That includes birthdays, addresses, and names of friends and family (including parents, siblings, spouses, children, and even pets). Obscurity versus complexityĪ common truism about passwords is that they should never be easy to guess. Here’s a rundown of common password weaknesses and some ways you can improve your passwords and your online safety. Unfortunately, the technology industry sometimes gets in the way of using them. Guess which was his aunt’s?įortunately, there are simple ways to make passwords both hard-to-guess and easy-to-remember. Looking over his shoulder, all three were everyday words: mophandle, mumbler, and lillian. One for email and social networking, one for his great aunt’s email (“I check it for her”), and another for everything else. How was he moving all his passwords over? He had a piece of paper in his wallet with “all his passwords” - and by all he meant three. These practices might sound like something from our grandparents’ generation, but that’s not strictly true: Last week I watched a full-fletched member of Generation D trying to shift from a Samsung Galaxy S (er, Fascinate) to an HTC Rezound via his notebook computer. And we also probably know someone who has a sticky note on the side of their monitor labelled “Passwords” (in red, double-underlined) with a list of everything from Twitter to Netflix just sitting in the open for anyone to read. Most of us probably know someone who uses the same password for everything, from their computer and email to their Facebook and bank accounts - and that password might be something as obvious as their birthday or the name of the street where they grew up. Yet most people are shockingly indifferent about their password security. They’re everywhere, and most of us use them for dozens of things every day. If there’s one thing people associate with modern technology, it’s passwords.
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