Password protection for everyone. #Tech

Passwords are literally the keys to our online world.

Sunday I was greeted by yet another email informing me that my online security may have been breached. Kickstarter isn’t the first to have shared their bad news with me of being hacked and they won’t be the last. Time to reevaluate passwords.

Since passwords aren’t dying anytime soon and mentally rotating a few no longer works because of the elaborate requirements for different online locations, I decided to use LastPass as my password manager.  But before I completed my account, I want a top-notch password for them. Recently I read this article, How to Create a Password That’s Easy to Remember but Hard to Hack and decided to give their “passphrase” idea a try.

For example, the phrase could be something like “I graduated from Notre Dame University on June 1st 2002.”  Pick the first letter from every word in that phrase, making sure you include the upper and lower case, and keep all the numbers.

That would give you the following password: “IgfNDUoJ1st2002” That’s a massive 15 characters and includes upper and lower case letters and numbers. Change the “I” to the symbol “!” and now you’ve made it even harder to crack.

Then I visited a few sites I frequent in order to play with LastPass and change a few passwords while I was at it.  My favorite feature is that you can change passwords on site quickly and replace them with automated passwords.  Nice.

There are more options to super-power my passwords and their protection, like the common key method, but LastPass is an easy and great start.

Still not convinced that a little time spent isn’t worth the effort now to avoid frustrations in the future? I get it because I had become lax and apathetic.  But really, we’re better than that.  We would never use any of the following passwords:

123456, 123456789, password, admin, 12345678, qwerty, 1234567, 111111, photoshop, 123123, 1234567890, 000000, abc123, 1234, adobe1, macromedia, azerty,iloveyou, aaaaaa, 654321

Right?  Because if we become too lax, we may be giving our keys away to a low-level hack.

How do you manage your passwords?  

And a big thanks to Ness at Vanessence who knows about computer tech and Android apps and encouraged that I might know more about my iPhone and MacBook than I realize 🙂

Have a great week! ~~~~~~~~ Angie Mc