Why A Secure Password is Essential
It should go without being said, but when creating passwords you need to try to keep them hard to guest as well as something you will remember. That is generally the hardest part of creating a good password; remembering it. Naturally, you do not want computer hackers, or the wrong people gaining access to your personal data on your computer, that is why creating a good one should be a top priority.
A secure password is needed with many things involving your computer, as well as other things such as checking voice mail on your mobile phone. With all the websites one visits, as well as the many email addresses forums, etc.
Please find below some pointers to help you develop and maintain security for your personal information, and other vital data by creating a good password.
Never use birth dates or personal information such as family names pet names, city-state, date of birth. Etc.
It is usually best to not use real words. There are numerous hacking software and scripts available to the hacker to try all words in a dictionary to guess your password.
These can generally be deployed in a matter of minutes.
- Never use letter stings or numerical strings such as abc 123 or test 123 etc. Tese are very common and will tried right away.
- No not use the same password for every website you visit. If one site gets compromised it could potentially be giving your password to all your critical data.
- Things you should do to create a secure a password are as follows:
- Make your password at least 8 character long.
- Try to add numbers and letters as well as characters. Be sure include capitalized letters as well. Adding underscores often is a good option
Although you may wish to write all your passwords down or save them in an email. This is not recommended. If you use Firefox, IE, or Chrome, however, there is a password manager which can store your data for you. This does come in handy if you have to remember 1000 good passwords. It is suggested however that you create a nice and secure password so no one can access that area of your computer without it
Are Secure Passwords any use Any more?
The world most dangerous hackers are out there using the Realtime web to try to break the most secure passwords. If you are wondering what the Realtime web is, it is realtime information that is generated by people on the Internet on services like Twitter and Facebook. To learn about all your secure passwords, the hacker create a virus that works like Twitter that gets on your computer and ‘tweets’ home with messages every now and then about every single thing you do. The world first learned about his a couple of years ago. They traced it to China and Eastern Europe, but they haven’t go much further than that.
Why do the identity thieves need to go real –time Twitter-style any away? They need it because there are corporations that use security packages like SecurlD that create new secure passwords automatically every minute. Once a virus learns of a password. It will have a window of a minute to phone home and ask the creator of the virus to rob the company blind. The creator of the virus, using all kinds of complex methods to hide his location, will remotely log on to the computer he wishes to rob and do his deed. And no one will be any the wiser. The creators of the automatic password change software, RSA, really thought it was a high tech solution to the whole malware problem; little did they guess that there was such a low tech method of breaking through.
These viruses don’t always directly attack the corporations either; there is one out there that use a technique known as Clampi that aims to go through the laptops of employees of large corporations who happen to have access to the company bank account. Once Clampi is one a computer that has access to the corporate network, it will quickly spread to every other computer in the company and really take them to the cleaners. You get the virus that does this when you visit websites that are infected. Anytime one of those computers logs on to a bank or something. Clampi knows immediately, and phones home with secure passwords it’s learned of. And that’s the end of that company’s bank account. The most outrageous way they use to infect a company with Clampi is; to bribe an employee to just infect his company laptop with the virus and use it to log onto the company’s network. He get his cut and the Clampi virus will spread to every important computer on the company and no one will know where it come from
They’ve traced this particular virus to Russia; and they are selling versions of the virus (with names like ZeuS ) all over the world Talk about export promotion. Does this mean this designing secure password is a complete waste of time? They are a complete waste of time if your computer has Clampi. For Everything else though, passwords rule.
