Creative Password Guide

Written by Georg Monday, 25 January 2010 12:47

Another old and repeated saga: the simple dictionary passwords users cannot care less about. Comes yesterday, Sunday evening news on RTL. A short instructive survey indicates that the most used password is "123456" or... "password" - yes!, the word "password". And I thought that was a "Naked Gun" parody series gag by Leslie Nielsen...  Turns out that reality is often times worse than parody. You may do a google for the string: "most used passwords" in order to discover more attrocious variations of reality.

An ideal world won't need passwords, nor locks at the doors. This because everyone would mind his own business, respecting the privacy of peers, abiding to social decency standards and so on. The higher the security we have to enforce, the more accute the symptom of a wilder world we're having to live in. It is not as much a matter of choice as it is an issue of survival, not to overuse the dreaded "defense" word.

We've always been making a great case of web security issues, enforcing strong passwords, string combinations of alpha numerics and special characters, with a minimal length imposed and so on and so forth.

Such a secure password will better defend your account against the brute force robot attacks continuously roaming the net, knocking at your doors. Not actually knocking, but rather forcing the locks of your doors. Remember the recent attack against Google accounts, exploiting the meager MSIE browser security. The German government went that far to publicly recommend the public drops MSIE altogether in favor of other more secure browsers.

But so far you're using Firefox or Opera to open your Google mail account with a password like 696969, there's a more greater chance the brute force robots will break in in less than 5 seconds and possibly steal your Paypal account data. Ahha! Now you may start open your eyes and listen, because there's your money in Paypal, right? And Paypal relays to you via email, which goes inside your Google mail box.

Let's only hope that more and more stubborn users will come back from Aliceland to realize how important is to:

1. Keep your home and car keys in a safe place.

2. Keep your SS#, CC#s, PIN codes, etc. secret.

3. Use cryptic passwords that you MUST NOT remember by heart (you're not a machine, or are you?), just write them down in your wallet somewhere, to be kept in the same safe places like the previous personal mentioned secrets.

Better be safe than sorry!

Comments (0)

Show/hide comments

Show/hide comment form

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment Preview