Only on rare occasions on Plum Prairie Ranch do I get requests to write about a specific topic. For weeks now, one of my biggest fans has been on my case to address a BIG issue. That BIG issue is (drumroll, please)… passwords. Now wait just a minute before your eyes glaze over. Passwords matter. The Fix It Farmer, the IT specialist for the entire Engelland clan, asked me to write about the importance of passwords. He wrote about this issue a number of years ago here, and he’s still very passionate about it.
I dragged my feet for a while. How does the importance of passwords fit in a blog about simple living, DIY and health? Because identity theft will complicate your life and shoot your stress levels into the stratosphere.
Almost every day we hear about massive data breaches by hackers looking to steal whatever they can from any digital vault you can imagine. This past week, a data breach at Equifax (one of the big three credit monitoring services in the United States) compromised personal information of more than 140 million people (almost half of the U.S. population). You may not even know that your social security number was swiped because you didn’t know Equifax had it.
Find out here if you may have been impacted by the Equifax breach.
Online banking, online shopping, online payments. All of them can open you up to be a potential victim of a hacker.
Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself online with the best password practices:
The longer, the better. Most banking sites only require eight characters with a mixture of upper and lowercase letters and numbers. Go for at least 14 characters and add in special characters ($#@!). No, I didn’t just swear. The longer your password, the longer it will take to crack. You can take it from days to years of hacking time. It’s more important to have a long password than to change a short password often.
Strangely enough, a long string of random words is surprisingly easy to remember, like monkeyribbonicecreamgentle. I can get that to stick in my head without a lot of effort.
This comic from Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd (a favorite of geeky nerds like my sweet husband), illustrates the importance of a long password.
It’s good to be random. The Fix-it Farmer calls me “Random Woman.” It often trips me up, but here it’s an asset. A string of random words interspersed with special characters and numbers is one of the best ways to develop a strong password. I find I can remember quite a few strings of random words. Get out the old paper dictionary, close your eyes, turn some pages and point. Or use an online system like diceware.
You can make the password easier to remember by always putting the special character and number in the same location, like at the very end. Here’s an example using the words from earlier:
monkeyribbonicecreamgentle%5J
Adding the special character, number and upper case letter makes the password much stronger. If you use the same location and pattern, it’s easier to remember.
Unlike what you see in the movies, hackers don’t decode your password one character at a time. They must crack the whole thing at once. That’s why a long password is so much harder to solve.
Use an encrypted (strong password protected) system like KeePass if you want to keep your long random passwords handy on your computer or phone in case you forget them. My IT guy doesn’t like to trust his passwords to a system like LastPass that automatically generates and enters them for you each time because he worries you may not have that with you when you need it AND it’s hanging out there online where the hackers dwell.
Whatever you do, don’t have them on a spreadsheet on your computer (unless you encrypt it) or a notebook you carry around with you (and could be stolen).
My computer savvy hubby, my Fix-it Farmer, would want me to leave you with this:
Friends don’t let friends use weak passwords. Change ’em up, folks.