With the onslaught of data breaches that have been in the news lately (think Target or Sony), INF presents this multi-part blog series about keeping your data safe in the digital age.<\/p>\n
Passwords<\/strong><\/p>\n Do you pick a password and then use that for all of your accounts or do you choose short passwords that are easy to remember?\u00a0 Is your password \u201cPassword\u201d or the name of your pet?\u00a0 Do you keep a word document or piece of paper with all of your passwords written down?\u00a0 If so, your digital information could be in trouble.\u00a0 More than 60% of people use the same password on multiple accounts.\u00a0 In the digital world, this means that if I can break into one account, then I can have access to all of your accounts. \u00a0This is why when a data breach happens with one retailer, fraudulent activity among other retailers goes up as well due to usernames and passwords being the same.<\/p>\n Most people choose their passwords from a finite set of words, phrases and numbers (or some variant of this), which makes guessing your password a trivial task for most hackers.\u00a0 They use a \u201cDictionary Attack\u201d on an account, which takes commonly used words from the dictionary and puts them together with numbers and other words to create a password to try.\u00a0 Bear in mind, this is not a human being doing this, so multiple attempts to guess your password can be made by the second and whole attacks can last less than one minute.\u00a0 Additionally, software that does this is commercially available and thus, is very easy to implement.\u00a0 Once a hacker has cracked one of your accounts, they immediately target others.\u00a0 In doing this, they will touch as many accounts as they can before you are alerted that anything is wrong.<\/p>\n How To Choose a Strong Password<\/strong><\/p>\n In order to combat this and become a smarter user, you must create a strong, non-trivial password for each account that you have.<\/p>\n Choosing a strong password becomes simple once you learn the following four rules:<\/p>\n One recommended way to create a password is to think of a phrase from a book or song that you like and turn it into a password.\u00a0 As an example, if you are a fan of \u201cHitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy\u201d by Douglas Adams, you may turn the phrase \u201cSo long and thanks for all the fish!\u201d into the password \u201cS81ng&Tks4@!!f!$h!\u201d.\u00a0 Notice that none of the actual words were used and not all of the substitutions were obvious, such as \u201c8\u201d for \u2018o\u2019.\u00a0 A simple trick to remember is \u2013 the longer the password, the stronger the password.<\/p>\n You may be asking, \u201cHow in the world am I going to remember all of these passwords?\u00a0 I must have over 90+ accounts online, like the average American!\u201d\u00a0 There is no need to remember all of the passwords that you create.\u00a0 In fact, if you can remember one very strong password, you can access all of your others by using a password management program such as KeePass, 1Password or Dashlane.<\/p>\n Part 2 of this series will cover setting up and using a password management program.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the onslaught of data breaches that have been in the news lately (think Target or Sony), INF presents this multi-part blog series about keeping your data safe in the digital age. Passwords Do you pick a password and then … Continue reading \n