CSA Online by Andrew Moore-Crispin About Your Passwords Chances are that you’re not using password best practices, even if you’re not using one of those obviously awful passwords. There’s a good reason for that. Without some help, password best practices vary and are practically impossible to follow. Have you ever used the same password (strong or otherwise) with more than one online service? Gone years without changing passwords?Written down or otherwise left passwords open to potential compromise (e-mailing them, saving them on your computer, storing them in Dropbox or another online service, for example)? Me too. These are examples of poor password hygiene. Besides using simple passwords, these are the next greatest threats to personal security and privacy online. Dulling the Online PasswordPain The passwords which you’re using online suck. It’s not an accusation. It’s a statistically supported supposition. Have you ever used password123 for an online login? How about 123456? Perhaps you got fancy and came up with passw0rd or 1qaz2wsx? These, like starwars, monkey, letmein and iloveyou are examples of the absolute worst possible passwords that you could use. Just because your password doesn’t rank in the Wikipedia-compiled, top-25 list of most common passwords from which I grabbed these examples, doesn’t mean that it’s safe. A note about fear mongering. I’m not a fan. I think that it’s cheap and more often gets people spun up about the wrong things. This is serious, though. The good news: the solution to using passwords (again, whether they make the top 25 or not) isn’t much harder than the lazy way. 52 | www.snowbirds.org
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzMzNzMx