Choose Your Password Wisely, Or Leave It Blank

with our digitized lives ever increasing everyday, we depend even more on systems to secure our personal identities like, usernames, passwords, bank accounts, email accounts etc. but these systems can only do so much to protect us.  in fact, they pretty much rely on us to be cautious enough to choose the best secure methods available to prevent intruders from gaining access to our personal things. in this article I remind everyone to be cautious when choosing their system and online account passwords.

On Windows, why no password is better than an easy password?

Starting from Windows XP, Windows does not allow anyone to gain remote access to the system, unless there is a password. that means that if your computer is part of a network, workgroup etc, no one can’t remote login to your system using technologies like remote desktop, or other remote software, and steal your information. using no password will give a hard time to script kiddies trying to breach into windows with brute force. Now, if you have an easy to guess password like “1234″ or “QWERTY” “PUPPY”  etc ( do those sound familiar to you ) anyone can sniff and decode your password using tools like http://www.oxid.it/cain.html, these tools use dictionaries and hashes to guess your password, the easier your password the quickest the guess. you don’t have to be an expert hacker to do that, you only need to know how to use the tool.

Choosing your password

when it comes to choose a password think about something different other than your pet, wife, children, family, favorite places, schools, etc. nothing that can be associated with you. when someone tries to get access to your account those are the first things he/she tries, the more the person knows about you, the greater is the possibility of guessing your password. never choose a password less than 8 characters, in those characters use upper and small letters, special characters and numbers. a good password would be a password like this J%6+av5tw@YT you might be thinking, how the hell I’m gonna remember a password like that!!, well, you can create a password like that and still have a meaningful reason to remember. J@2#$a8n0SM is a password that is hard to guess, but is easy for for me to remember, because most of the characters represent something that I only know. I’m not using full names of things but only first and last letters of things that have great values to me.

Maintain your security

setting and using a password for years is not a good practice, you should at least change your password every two months, that way people don’t become too familiar with your password. never write your password on sticky notes posted on your monitor, or under your keyboard, don’t let it to be saved on online forms or applications. when you save passwords on browsers, they can be easily decrypted, Firefox can even do it without doing anything special. don’t reply to emails from companies like banks or credit card bureaucracies asking your to authenticate your account  by entering your username and password, those emails are phishing emails, and most likely they want your identity. a reputable bank or credit company will never ask for that.

A final thought

Our social and financial lives are saved somewhere in the vast cloud of ONs and OFFs bits of a hard drive in a web server or datacenter. that is what we call our privacy, or achievements and survival security, but now more than ever we are vulnerable to lose that as easy as a click of a button. think about a situation happening near the time of your retirement, someone from an obscured region gets access to your bank and other financial accounts and leave zero balance on your savings, I can assure you, you won’t be traveling that much. I don’t want to sound pessimist, but this can happen to anyone. choose your passwords wisely.