Email, and Passwords Passwords Passwords

Email: If your email is compromised by a hacker, than the hacker also has access to any other accounts associated with that email address.  Follow the steps below to update to new, more secure passwords.

Passwords: The easiest link in a person's security chain to compromise is most often a password.

A.) Every password should be unique. Never use the same password for more than one account, as this requires a hacker to compromise only 1 password to access any of your accounts.

B.) Change your passwords frequently. Even random passwords can be guessed eventually. As the "infinite monkey theorem" states, a monkey hitting keys at random on on a keyboard will eventually have hit the right sequence of keys to guess your password. Computers can do this much faster than any monkey.

C.) Use Strong Passwords! Passwords should be random alpha-numeric (with symbols if allowed by service) as to make dictionary attacks unlikely. For example: F4k72bT is much more secure than jon123. Creating secure passwords can be easy with the following examples:

     1.) Think of an easy-to-remember sentence and take the first letter (or 2) of each word (lower, and uppercase), numbers and special characters (!,&,$,#,-...)... For example the sentence “In ‘97, Bob and I were on vacation in Spain!” would result in a password like “I’97BaIwoviS!”

          i.) In order to remember what password you used for an account try adding something about the account as part of the sentence or pre/post tag along with each password. From the above example, “I’97BaIwoviS!_Fb” for a facebook login, or “On_I’97BaIwoviS!_Ba” for online banking login. An example sentence including the name of (or abbreviation/symbol, mnemonic) the service you are logging into: “In ‘97, Bob and I became Myspace friends!” results in a easy-to-remember password of “I’97BaIbMf!”, which has the added security benefit of being unique to the service.

     2.) If you do not wish to create all these passwords, it can be a good secure alternative to use a “random password generator”.

     3.) Password Manager: It is not a good idea to write passwords down anywhere in plain text. To aid in keeping your passwords secure regardless of which method was used to create them, you may wish to use a “password manager”. One free (cross platform) password manager application is “keypass password safe” which also includes a strong random password generator (as mentioned in previous section). You can freely download keypass for your platform (computer, or smartphone) from their site http://keepass.info/