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Cyber Mistakes You Should Never Make – 30

Talking About Passwords

In ancient days, (like before the Internet was commercially available)  when you used a BBS you might have an easy password.

You could use 1234 or abcd… it wasn’t important.

The first time your account was hacked, you’d call the owner of the BBS, and he or she would be able to check who had used your password by tracing the phone number.

If/when it happened to you, the instant response would be to go from 1234 to !234 or 123$ or from abcd to bacd or @bcd…  one easy memorable change.

As time passed and hackers became more prevalent, sites demanded that longer password… some… 12 characters.   One of the characters would have to be a symbol, one a number, one an upper case letter.

So, writing down the password became mandatory.

At work, there were post-its on every computer; here’s one &trW765r(^av.    Now you know that’s the password.

Really great security, huh?

Reality is if you have to write it down to remember it, it isn’t safe.

You can create passwords you can remember.

Take this easy one is mycoffeecup.   Now, you do a bit of change. My(0ffee(U%.

That is a capital M a lower case y an open parenthesis, a Zero, two ‘fs’  another open parenthesis, a capital U a Percentage sign as the ‘p’ ending with a period.

You can play with any terms you want, as long as you don’t have to write it down, you’re good.

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Written by jaylar