Where do you keep all your passwords ?
- I have a little book that I keep with me…
- I have a file on the computer with them all in…
- I only have a couple of passwords that I use, so I can remember them….
- I write them down on post-it notes and stuck them to the screen….
How often do you change your passwords ? … Once a week/month or never…
The majority of people do one of the above methods and never change passwords. This is fantastic for hackers because if they can get into one of your accounts, then they could get in to many of your other accounts.
What’s the solution…..
- Make sure all your passwords are very different from each other.
- Always use complex passwords with a minimum length of 12 characters e.g. kjub6565fv%$%ygfs8.
- Do not have a plain file e.g. text/Excel/Word on your system with all the passwords – make it an encrypted file.
- Do not have a little book with passwords as this is not very secure and if you loose the book then you are in trouble.
If you have a photographic memory then you can stop here, but the majority of us are not that fortunate and this is where a password manager comes to the rescue.
Generally, password managers store all the credentials (Web site name, user name and password) in an encrypted file with a lock on that file (normally a single password but you can also have additional key code files). Therefore, you only need to remember a single password to get access to all the others. This password should be one that you can remember and is sufficiently complex that it cannot be easily hacked e.g. make a small sentence with spaces, change case randomly from upper to lower case and add some numbers and special characters e.g. $#@-* etc.
Care must be taken to insure that this file is backed up or replicated to another device otherwise you have all your eggs in one basket which could break !