Welcome to part two of my personal battle against pesky password thieves. Don't be the one that becomes their next victim! Last week I explained briefly the danger of password hacking of web sites such as Amazon and Paypal. Nobody wants to have to remember multiple passwords, so they reuse their Paypal and Amazon passwords for other web sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The problem is that if your password for one web site is stolen, you could be the next victim of online fraud.
Remember The Golden Rule .. Don’t Re-Use Passwords!!
It is a real pain to have to use a different password for each of your online logins, but once you have been bitten, you realise that it’s worth it. My heart stopped when I saw that someone had transferred £680 out of my Paypal account, so it’s not going to happen again in a hurry. Realistically, you need to keep a spreadsheet of your passwords for your online logins. Not only that, but you need to make them good passwords including upper and lower case letters as well as special characters.
My Password System
I worked out a system that I am happy to share with you because it works for me. You can adapt it and make it more complex. It all depends on how obsessive you want to be about it!
My recipe for password security has three simple ingredients:
- A number of 4 or 5 word phrases
- Some special characters that you alter for each login
- A string of character that you are going to remember. Make it the first part of your partner’s vehicle registration plate or something equally memorable.
You then create a system using a spreadsheet and a little imagination. Here’s one I cooked up earlier based on the first letters of the words in Beatles songs:
Needless to say you don’t have to use Beatles songs. You could use book titles, proverbs, recipes or just about anything else the will give you a number of phrases of 4-5 words. Just devise your own system, work out where you are going to put your special characters, which letters will be upper case and which will be lower case and generate as many passwords as you need. If you want to be really fastidious you may want to use an application such as 7-Zip to store the spreadsheet in a password protected zip file. Just make sure that you can remember that password … and make it a good one!
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