Did you know that the average person has 12-17 different passwords to remember? Our chapter we are working on this week is dealing with account management. I had to interview three people about their passwords and how they remember them. Did you know that unless your password is at least 12 characters or longer it is considered weak? Hackers have programs that use a dictionary to run words to find out passwords. Here are couple of things to keep in mind when picking your passwords. Don't use personal information like: kids names, birthdays, and pet names. It is not good to use words, even spelled backwards because the dictionary program will run all words forward and backward. You should also use a password with numbers and characters like: !, @, $, and upper and lower case letters mixed.
There are programs that you can download to help you keep up with your passwords. I was a little skeptical about these. Part of our work in this chapter we had to download a program like this to try it out. One of these programs can be found at keepass.info. This can be downloaded to a USB so that it is not left on your computer all the time. I like that feature very much. Check this site out, they have good information about all of this too. I like the USB feature because you could keep work and personal passwords together. The draw back is that if you lost your USB then you have lost ALL of your passwords. Tip for the day; look at your passwords if they are less than 12 characters consider changing them. As more and more information moves to the computer we are going to need better security to protect our selves.
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