“Type password here,” the instructions read, and that’s exactly what millions of unwitting computer users over the years have done. They’ve obediently placed their cursor in the box, and typed the word, “password.” No big deal, you say? Think again!
Sadly, the most used passwords are God, sex, love and money, with the number one most used password being (drum roll, please) the word “password.” Contrary to what you may think, your “password,” whether it’s for Internet access, email, or online shopping, should never, ever be a “word.” Your password should never be found in any dictionary, should not be your dog’s birthday, or your Social Security number. Passwords like this make it easy for the bad guys, who use automated password “cracking” programs with names like “John the Ripper” to cycle through multiple words in multiple languages, frontward, backwards, sideways and every other way in an effort to discover weak passwords. Number sequences such as “123123123” are a bad choice, as well. Weak passwords fall to password crackers in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
A good password will be a mixture of upper and lower case letters, special characters (such as, !@^&#) and numbers. Use as many as you can stand. The National Security Agency recommends a minimum of 12 characters for a password. Since most network logon and email programs will “remember” your password for you, you shouldn’t need to type it too many times, so, don’t use memorization worries as an excuse for having a weak password. Rather than writing it on a sticky note stuck to your monitor (a bad practice), keep it in your wallet, purse or other semi-secure place, somewhere that it won’t be lost!
If you work in an environment where you do need to memorize and frequently re-type your password, base your password on a memorable phrase or saying. Use numbers and special characters as letter substitutes in your phrase, such as using $ for the letter “s,” and + for the letter “t.” An example of a password put together this way is “+nT!@gN4m2r,” which stands for, “the Norman Transcript is a great newspaper for me to read.” With a little practice, remembering passwords can be quite easy, certainly easier than trying to fix your credit record!
The username/password combination is part of what’s known in the computer business as “authentication.” In order to make sure that someone who’s trying to logon to a network is “authentic,” they are asked to provide something that only they and the network administrators are privy to, such as a user name and password. Something to keep in mind is that, when you sign up for Internet service, you do not have to use your actual name as your user name. After all, why give away that part of your identity to anyone who may happen to come across your email address? On the Internet, anonymity can be a good thing!