If you were going on vacation and you knew your neighbor robbed houses for a living, you wouldn’t give him keys to your house and ask him to keep an eye on it while you were gone? As ridiculous as that sounds, many people unknowingly take risks just as big when choosing online passwords. To reduce your risk you need to use safe passwords whether it be for website login accounts, e-mail, to pay bills, or play to games.
There are many reports on the internet of hackers that have stolen someone’s password and used it to gain credit card information, banking information, hack websites or to send viruses to multiple people. While there may be no guarantees in life, there are things you can do to choose safe passwords, passwords that will be much harder for a hacker to learn.
One of the most common mistakes people make in choosing passwords is to choose the name of a loved one, such as a spouse, child, brother or sister, or parent as a password. They may even only use part of the name with a number or use the name backward, with a number. They may also do the same thing, using the name of a beloved pet. Be careful in choosing such a password, as these passwords are usually not safe and are sometimes easy for a hacker to guess.
Short passwords are often unsafe and easy for a hacker to guess, no matter what they are, no matter what the meaning.
You should also not use something that has a special meaning to you as your password, because while you may think that would be safe, you might be surprised at how wrong you could be. Examples of those types of passwords would be: the name of your favorite sports team; your phone number or cell phone number; the name of your favorite book or movie or of characters from that book or movie; a favorite player on your favorite team; your favorite drink; or the name of a famous computer scientist.
To create a safe password, don’t use the name of a coworker or your boss, the name of the computer system you use, your Social Security number, the birthday of anyone you know, including yourself; or your driver’s license number. In addition, don’t use the name of the school you went to college or high school at, or a word such as guru or wizard. Such names are much too common.
It would also be very easy for a hacker to obtain your password, if you choose one which has several letters that are all the same. Another thing that would be unsafe would be to choose a password that is already on your computer in some manner.
Whatever you do, don’t use a password that is the same as one of your usernames. Such a technique is very unsafe, and is called a “Smoking Joe.” If you want to keep your password safe, don’t write it down anywhere; memorize your password instead. Many college professors have made that mistake and have found students have changed their grades.
If your password is complicated enough that you do need to write it down, to keep it safe, take some steps as a precaution. Don’t identify it as a password anywhere, or include the name of your computer or Internet account. Never write down your network name or the phone number of the computer. To make your password even safer, you can disguise it by mixing it with other letters or mixing it up in such a way that only you would know.
To keep your password safe, you should never include it in an e-mail, or in an online file or data base. Did you know that many hackers scan e-mail messages looking for passwords?
There are also things you can do to choose safe passwords. Such a password will have upper and lower case letters. It might have numbers or punctuation marks. It may also have control characters and spaces. Although it will be simple enough you would not have to write it down, it would still should be seven or eight characters long. You should also be able to type it quickly, so nobody can learn what it is by simply looking over your shoulder.
An example of a good password would be one that combines two short words and a number or character. Examples would be dog5house or pig_ball. You could also use an acronym that would be familiar only to you, such as IlmDIhmJIlmC (I love my dog; I hate my job; I love my computer.).
Tags: account passwords, credit card fraud, hackers, safe passwords, stolen identity
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May 9th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Nice tips! This is one thing that everyone should know. I’m also starting to have doubts on automatic password generators since they can also be used by hackers. Since it generates a password for you it might also give that same password to other people who use it. IMO it is still best to create you own unique password.
May 10th, 2008 at 4:32 am
In my case , I stick to alphanumeric passwords and try not to use the same number combinations twice. It always helps that these days both yahoo and Gmail accounts don’t accept a password until they feel it’s safe. For the most important accounts I use for online transactions and such, I use geometric progressions with variable words. Yeah, sometimes it’s a challenge to remember it yourself but not if you regularly use the account. Better to use the gray cells than become a victim of hackers.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:32 am
Very very pertinent and good advice. I think most people use easy passwords out of practicality, conveneience and plain laziness. For me, my password is always alpha -numeric, not totally random for ease of remmbering it.
May 10th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
These are great tips because who better knows about your personal likes other than yourself. Of course, this is different if you are sharing your personal information to somebody else then I’m sure that your password is unsafe. This is just the same thing that I’m doing right now! I’m using a password that has a connection to my true self.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Most “safe” password checkers just arent. The best passwords (and are rarely accepted by sites due to their length) are sentences which tend to be really easy to remember. Something like
My house has a green door and a garage.
would be virtually impossible to break by brute force. Passwords with numbers on the end or the common substuitites of numbers for letters IE Pa55w0rd are often hacked as there are long lists with pre-hacked passwords. Always best to use a different password on each site since a lot of sites dont use quite the security they should do.
May 11th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
A few years ago I worked at a large company on their computer help desk. We had an incident where some staff seemed to be getting the passwords of managers, and getting into files they weren’t supposed to see. We had a pretty good password policy and a lot of those tips that were in this posting.
When the computer staff finally resorted to walking around to all the managers desks, we found that one assistant had carefully collected passwords for several of the managers he worked with, and written them on a sticky note which was posted on his bulletin board by his desk. The managers never should have given him their passwords, but he made them available to anyone walking by!
Needless to say, we made everyone involved change their passwords and re-explained to them about not giving passwords to anyone.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:14 am
These are excellent tips for choosing a safe password. It’s amazing to me how many people that are willing to just blab their account passwords to anyone. Especially when many people only use one password for all accounts so when they blab their password to one account often they are giving their password to everything!
May 13th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I made a cool password generator for stuff like this. I agree, passwords are far too week nowa’days, I know a lot of people that use their spouses name, or similar, which are easy to guess and therefore easy to break -> not good
All my passwords are hexadec, about 9 chars
May 14th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Guilty as charged. I have the hardest time remember passwords unless they are meaningful to me. Sorry but there’s no way I’m remembering “X1fsdE5dQ”. Of course I see the need for better passwords. I’m just waiting for the day that your mouse has a built in thumbprint scanner that connects you to your websites.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:41 am
Keeping safe and difficult to guess passwords is always helpful. Many hackers try to guess passwords depend on the username but if you keep a good password for your important accounts then your data will remain secure and then you don’t have to worry about it. Thanks for the post.It was nice reading it.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:54 am
It’s surprising how many people use such poorly chosen passwords on their computers and online.
Yet, would they do the same with their bank accounts? It seems people forget how easily accessible their computers are to the rest of the world. They contain so much personal information and people need to start protecting themselves. I can’t believe that people still pick such common passwords after all you hear about; there are constant reports of PayPal hacking, MySpace, etc. There are even lists of “Most Common Myspace Passwords” and such! Taking a look at such things is a good way to find out what NOT to do when choosing a password. It’s nice that places such as Google are now requiring that their systems approve the security of your password before allowing you to register.
May 18th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Useful tips- these are things that everyone should know. People worry so much about online security, but in the end if they would just protect themselves properly by doing things such as choosing a proper password to begin with, they wouldn’t have so much to worry about… it’s a simple (yet probably the most effective way) to protect yourself online.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Having a safe password is very essential. I myself have observed many people typing in their passwords while others watched. Passwords must be a combination of characters and numbers so that it cannot be easily hacked. It must not be a birthday, phone number or any other type of commonly known information which can be easily guessed.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:37 am
Nice tips. Unfortunately, there are too many people who don’t follow this advice. I hope this post enlightens them. Its a bad idea to use a word of the English language as your password as its easy to hack using brute force methods. Another good tip is to not use the same password everywhere. I keep separate passwords for my important accounts. Its good to have complicated passwords but it should not be random. It should make some meaning to you so that you can remember it.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Those are great tips. The only thing I would disagree with is making it so complicated that you would have to actually write it down. Even if you don’t identify it as a password someone could easily check if they find the piece of paper or whatever you wrote it on.
May 24th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Given time, any looping program can crack a password. It’s also a good idea to use characters that aren’t part of the standard english alphabet, you might be able to use things like japanese kanji in a password. If the person in question can’t type in kanji, it’s a complete nightmare.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I would also like to give one more tip. While using the bank ATM, please stand in front of the machine and type the password. Make sure your body hides the information you are typing in otherwise people who are good at observing, may easily guess your pin and hack it.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Yes, and that same kind of advice applies to using computers in public spaces. If you use a machine at your local library for instance, it probably doesn’t save passwords (if they have good IT staff) but someone watching over your shoulder could easily see what you’re typing.
May 31st, 2008 at 11:47 am
I try to use a different password for everything and while I do write them down, I keep them in a hidden place. My computer is at home and rarely does anyone ever go near my computer. Whenever anyone does, I am here in the room with them. Even so, I may still need to change what I”m doing here, to make it even more secure.
June 1st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
@mamitito
I don’t really need to write them down, since I have my Firefox set to remember most of my passwords. I’m only secure on passwords when it’s something I actually care about.
If I need to know a password, I can just hunt through my FF settings for it.
June 12th, 2008 at 4:33 am
I tend not to use softwares that remember/store passwords and personal details like roboform or even firefox. I feel little insecure storing them , but if I must then I store them in a folder on my flash drive .That way, even if my computer gets hacked, I wouldn’t be at risk of losing my access to all my accounts.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 am
I recently had a user call me to ask for help with her hotmail account. Some got hold of her password, logged into her account and started sending mails to everyone asking them to send her money because she was stuck in a foreign country because someone stole her money.. The person also changed her password, secret question and alternate email thereby completely locking her out. After that incident, we had to send an email out to all users warning them about the importance of having complex passwords and keeping them secure at all times.