New Year, New Passwords

It is the first full work week of the New Year and many of us are getting back to work after a long winter/holiday break. I do hope that you had a most wonderful time of the year. Remember, as of today (01/06/09) there are only 297 days till Halloween with the rest of the holiday season right behind, but I digress.

As we close in on the end of the first seven days of the new year, people are still working their resolutions and are diving head first into losing some of those unwanted pounds or read more or ____________(fill in the blank). Did you know that this is great time and opportunity to change your passwords?

Oh, Man....I don't wanna change my passwords.

Sorry folks, but it is good practice and it helps prevent hackers, phishers, and anyone other black hats out there from getting to your stuff. I am not saying anything new here; there are plenty of real world examples of bad guys doing bad things to Networks, PCs, and Credit Cards, so it’s up to you.

So take a few minutes and change your passwords and if possible change your ATM password as well. It is relatively simple and so very important. If you are running short of password ideas here are a few do's and don'ts.

• Select a password you will not easily forget. While it is not advisable that you write down your password but if you must then you try the following. For example, if the password is “crayon” then you can write it on paper like this c _ _ _ o _ there ya go two letters and the appropriate number of blank spaces.
  
  
• Do not select a password that is a word you can find in a dictionary to include antidisestablishmentarianism. While you might be tempted to use a word, you can substitute numbers for letters such as the number 3 for the letter E, the number 1 for the letter L, and the number 0 for the letter O. As an example, the word “crayon” can look like this c r 4 y 0 n.
  
  
• The longer the better when it comes to passwords. As a rule, I tell people for it to be 8 characters in length or more. So do not the example of crayon because if everyone reads this post then everyone will know your password.
  
  
• In most cases passwords are case-sensitive, meaning that if your password has a capital letter you cannot use the lower case as a substitute. However, please mix it up with upper case, lower case and numbers and some symbols such as (! @ # $ % ^ & *) and even the space bar.
  
  
• If you have multiple accounts, please do not use the same password for all accounts. Mix things up as well. While it may be easier to keep track of one password, it will be easier for the bad guys to access all your accounts.
  
  
• Speaking of mixing things up, please ensure that your password does not consist of the same characters such as AAAAAAAA or 11111111 or a sequence of characters such as 12345678 or ABCDEFGH.
  
  
• Lastly, do NOT use any personal information. That means no birthdays such as JAN72009 or something that people could easily identify you with such as your license plate TXN127.
  

Take a little time and have some fun creating a password or two. Also, just like you are supposed to change your smoke alarm batteries twice a year, change your passwords just as often.


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