October 6th, 2009 | by Barb Dybwad
Perhaps in light of over 20,000 email accounts including Gmail being recently compromised, Google thought it might be a good time to remind everyone about how to create a secure password.
Half the battle is being alert for signs of phishing — a method hackers use to trick people into sharing personal information including account passwords. The other half is starting with a strong password, and changing it to another smart password regularly — particularly if you have any suspicion your account might have been compromised.
To many of you these are probably old hat by now (and some of them are plain common sense), but in light of the recent successful scams that saw as many as 30,000 account details posted online, it might be worth a periodic review:
Use different passwords on different sites — After all, if you use the same login credentials for multiple sites and one gets compromised, they all are. Since many of us use umpteen web services daily, it’s worth checking out a good password manager tool to help you keep the all straight — and safe.
Don’t use common words or sequences — Simple dictionary terms or sequential numerical sequences won’t cut it. You should make sure your passwords are a mix of letters, numbers and symbols.
Don’t base passwords on personal data — Hackers often use “social engineering” techniques to greater effect than running actual lines of code. Since we routinely share various bits of personal data with others, things like pet names, middle names, birthdays and so on don’t make a good basis for passwords.
Don’t leave your password somewhere visible — If you simply must write it down, don’t put it on a post-it attached to your monitor. Relatedly, if you keep a list of passwords on your computer, name the file something more cryptic than “password file.”
Make sure your password recovery questions are also secure — Strong passwords that lack semantic meaning are unfortunately also easier to forget. Many sites allow you to reset your password over email or after answering one or more Security Questions you set up when creating the account. Make sure these aren’t based on common-knowledge personal data either — try to make them difficult to guess, and avoid any information you’ve posted publicly online anywhere as well.
What steps do you take to ensure the security of your online logins? Do you have any password or security tips to share? Let us know in the comments.
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