Protecting Your Online Privacy Part 2

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!

How To Protect Your Online Privacy

If you have read my blog recently, you will know that I had my PayPal account hacked a couple of weeks ago. It’s pretty embarrassing for me to get caught out since I have been involved in IT Security for over 10 years, but it shows that if it can happen to me, it can also happen to most of you who are reading my blog. So here are some helpful tips to ensure that you aren't the next one to end up with egg on your face and a hacker in your PayPal account.

The Online Golden Rule That I Broke!

I’m pretty convinced that my password was compromised because I made the schoolboy error of using the same password for PayPal as I had used for another Internet site. That site was probably hacked specifically to get hold of the web site's password file so that the hacker could try the email addresses and passwords on shopping sites such as Amazon and PayPal. When they tried my email address and password in PayPal, they would have thought that they had struck lucky. Fortunately for me, I saw the email payment confirmation from PayPal on my iPad, so I reported the incident to PayPal and changed the password within 20 minutes. Credit goes to PayPal who acted to return my £680 within 48 hours.

How Easily Can Hackers Get Your Passwords?

It is distressingly easy for Internet criminals to get hold of your PayPal / Amazon passwords. All they need to do is get hold of your password for another Internet site and then simply try it on Amazon, PayPal, or any number of other Internet shopping sites. If you are a Twitter user, have you ever seen any emails like this one?

If you have, and you clicked on the link, you probably also gave the bad guys your Twitter password, and if you use your Twitter password for PayPal, Amazon etc. please stop reading this blog post and go and change those passwords now!

The Golden Rule … DON’T RE-USE PASSWORDS!!

You may be careful not to click on “dodgy” links, but that won’t stop the bad guys from hacking one of the web sites that you belong to and getting your password, and don’t think that adding a “!” or a “£” to the start and end of your pet stick insect’s name is sufficient protection either. Password cracking software is pretty sophisticated now and will probably crack it in a few seconds (unless your stick insect is called Sy900$r5%)!

So How Can You Stay Secure Online?

The simple answer is that you need a system to provide you with strong, unique passwords for your online web site logins, and next week I will be happy to share mine with you. Don’t forget to come back next week!