Are you one of those wizards whose Internet banking password is `Password123’? You are in August company. Most don’t seem to have the patience to create an elaborate password. Your Internet banking account is only as secure as its password. A weak password exposes it to strangers and hackers.
If you love the ease of online transactions, you have to learn the ropes of basic online security, in your own interest.
Here are a few tips for creating and more importantly, remembering a secure password.
Your name, surname, pet name, names of your kids, your birthday, your employee number, your car’s number plate, and your account number, are all easy to guess. Avoid them completely.
Don’t create lazy passwords. To make passwords strong, complicate them with capitals and small letters; use numbers and characters such as !@#$% ^&*() .
Create an algorithm. It could be important dates, the first line of your favourite song or your favourite movie. Like `One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, will get you ‘1F^TCNest’.
Don’t scramble around wondering if `F’ was capital or if it was `o’ or `0’ or `1’. Have an algo and always apply it.
For example, one number, one character, beginning with caps and ending with the last word in full. Use the algo to reset and change passwords. Don’t discuss your algorithm, it is the formula to your password.
There are passwords to your Yahoo and Hotmail accounts and there are passwords to your bank account. Don’t sweat over the small stuff. If your friend logged in to read your mail, you may at the most lose a friend; if someone logs in to sweep off your cash, you lose both the money and the friend. Keep your critical passwords strictly confidential.
Also, avoid typing a password in front of someone. Passwords like ‘qwerty123456’ are so easy for peepers to figure. Avoid strokes to adjacent keys that can be cracked by mere observation.
Short passwords can be easily assaulted. Hackers routinely crack up to six characters. If your algo is a good one, remembering may not be tough. `Raindrops keep falling on my head and I want to steal your umbrella’ can become a superb password -- RkFoMh&Iw 2SyU.
Longer a password, the more secure it is. For, every extra character increases the potential for more possible combinations. Anyone who uses a combination of at least eight letters, numbers and special symbols make things hard for decryption software.
If you use 26 lowercase letters of the alphabet and a password length of seven characters you will have 26 = 8.03 billion combinations to choose from.
This may appear large but it will be cracked in 45 minutes by a common computer.
Passwords longer than seven characters, using non-dictionary words are therefore to be preferred in an attempt to use ’good’ passwords.
Don’t make the password so complicated and bizarre that you cannot remember it unless you wrote it down somewhere. Commit your password to memory with a keyword or picturisation.
Imagine for example, a cuckoo clock striking one, on the top of your bank building.
If you don’t leave your house key below the door mat, you don’t leave your password below the keyboard, mouse pad, in your diary, or on a post it slip stuck to your monitor.
If you have to store it, make it a sentence only you understand. For example, cuckoo clock above the bank strikes one. Never keep the user name and password together.
Online banking comes with some preset safeguards. Your password is masked when you type it -- it is not displayed on the screen. You are required to reset passwords periodically.
When you reset, you are asked for the old password for authentication. Your new password has to be typed twice, so that you don’t inadvertently set a password with a typo and are unable to retrieve it. Your account is locked after a few attempts at guessing the password. You can ask for resetting if you have genuinely lost the password.
As most writers on the subject say, a password is like your toothbrush: choose carefully, change regularly, and never share it with anyone.
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