Clutter your passwords!

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Started 11 months ago by ninakk
Latest reply from klutzgrrl
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ninakk
Member

If there is one thing only that has to be cluttered, then make it all your passwords. You might not have heard of LulzSec and if you haven't it's no biggie, since the important part is what they have in their possession now (they and many, many others on-line), namely a long list of email addresses and their passwords. Most passwords are ridiculously easy for people with suitable software to crack within a few hours and so I'm urging you all to revise your chosen words.

How about 11111? Or aaaaa? abc123 anyone? booklover? bookworm? There are many tutorials on-line on how to make it safer, but a good rule of thumb that DH taught me is to include lower caps, upper caps, numbers and signs (unless the latter are blocked due to some idiotic page-maintenance scheme). Don't use the same password everywhere and don't keep it in any physical form anywhere (which can be tricky if you're an unclutterer who wants to prepare for a crisis where the family needs your info).

Another tip is to try and log in with https wherever possible. Facebook for instance allows both http and https, and so my bookmark nowadays leads me directly to https ("s for secure"). If you log in with http, anyone who catches your info while it is on its way to the other site can read it and obviously use it.

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/06/16/1914222/What-LulzSec-Logins-Reveal-About-Bookworms-and-Passwords

Edit: apparently KeePass is fairly popular: http://keepass.info/download.html

Posted 11 months ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

Thanks for that reminder ninakk. I try to have good internet security, but with so many to remember it's easy to get lazy. For the most part, I'm not overly concerned - the worst that could happen with facebook is someone spamming my friends, really. I'd probably be pretty annoyed if someone hacked my Warcraft account. The big ones of course are the bank accounts.

Until recently I've been using a fairly simply system of words and numbers, but they are a bit too easy. Replacing letters with numbers seems like a good idea, but really, using ''1' instead of 'L' is obvious too. I'm a visual person, so I'm thinking of drawing a graphic shape with letters to use as a 'codebreaker' so I can use totally random letters. It'd be meaningless to anyone who didn't know what it was, or even if it was, the possible combinations would be endless.

Posted 11 months ago #
chacha1
Member

I'm gradually changing my passwords over to a three-part system - a head, core, and tail - that is relatively consistent and easy (for me) to remember. But yes, thanks for the reminder, because I still have a few to do!

Posted 11 months ago #
bandicoot
Member

i like use mottoes or phrases, mixed with numbers.
for example: my great uncle's DOB with the initials of say, Neque semper arcum tendit Apollo, alternating caps and lower case.
ie: 164nSaTa
hard to hack, but if you pick something personal to you, it is easy to remember.

Posted 11 months ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

Bandicoot, you love Latin too? Wow. I did a couple of years of latin... sadly forgotten too much of it these days. You're a genius, I'll use the first line of a favorite poem.

Posted 11 months ago #
irishbell
Member

so funny, there is Latin in a password or two of mine!
4 years of high school Latin has served me better than any other high school class.
I loved it.
Greece has long been my dream vacation...one day.

Posted 11 months ago #
Astreja
Member

I worked in IT for nearly a decade, and along the way I encountered entirely too many people who wanted to tell me their password so I could log on and fix their computer (I made them log on while my back was turned, or used my own account to gain access).

And then there's all the Post-It notes with passwords that I found under the keyboards. :-o

I use two logins with two different passwords, one for my online persona and one for real-life transactions. There are always numbers tucked away in there somewhere, and the phrases I use are obscure yet easy to remember, and can't be found in a dictionary.

There are no foolproof passwords, though, just ones that are harder to crack. There's something called a "brute force" crack that tries every possible combination of numbers and letters -- Literally billions of combinations. Best defence against that kind of attack is a long password, at least 10 characters.

Posted 11 months ago #
Mimi
Member

i got a tip for secure and easy passwords: just use very LONG words like
thisismypasswordfortheuncluttererwebsite
ebaymakemeshopmorethanishould
ireallycantremembermyamazonpasswordatall
:)

Posted 11 months ago #
Astreja
Member

I once knew someone who used the entire "One Ring" poem from Lord of the Rings as his password. :-D

Easy to remember but about 100 characters long, and I'd hear him cursing under his breath if he mistyped it.

Posted 11 months ago #
jbeany
Member

2Mimi - I've use something similar - but along the lines of St00pidFreakn#$%passwordfor...

Posted 11 months ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

lolz you guys are too funny. Thanks for making me smile!

Posted 11 months ago #

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