Keeping The Hackers Away From Your Passwords
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Ten years ago, things were painless on the internet – you often had just a single password to remember for your email account. Nowadays though it’s not remarkable to have 10 or 20 passwords for a myriad of internet services you’ve signed up to. So what happens? Lots of people tend to utilise the very same password over and over. Some individuals may not think their Twitter account as being majorly vital, but it is if you’re utilising the same password for that as you are for your Google Checkout account. Of course, the convenience of having to remember just one password is compelling, but what happens if an individual gets hold of that single password? You guessed it, they in theory have access to all of the servives you’ve signed up to that use that same password. And if you think they don’t know the other online services you’ve signed up to, they don’t need to. They launch web application programs which test literally thousands of services against your username/password pairing that they know about.
It’s an issue, but it’s easily remedied. In actual fact, it’s not necessary to remember each and every username/password. Let your browser do it. Be it your Yahoo Login or Email password. Just ask your web browser to remember each account name/password, and then have a master password just in case a person else gets physical access to your computer. If they do have such access, they will have to type in the master password in order to login to any of your services. So in effect, you can sign up to dozens of web services, and simply need to actually remember one single password : your web browser’s master password (achieving what you desired to do in a secure fashion – needing just the single password.
Regarding passwords themselves, make them random and long, such as K94545Dcd which is a mix of lower and upper case characters and numbers. As you don’t need to remember them yourself, be as obscure as you like. Whatever you do, don’t use dictionary words as your password, as these are easy to discover for hackers.