13 thoughts on “PATRICK ON PASSWORDS

  1. Jeff Meyerson

    Seriously, people really use ‘password’ as their password? Amazing.

    I agree with him that it is unrealistic to expect geezers like us (though he didn’t mention that as a factor) to remember every password without writing it down. But I do have many of mine memorized and yes, I do use the same one for more than one site. But then, if you don’t join so-called social network sites like you know what you can’t get your password stolen.

    Reply
  2. Richard

    oops. I use a half dozen pretty strong passwords, for the frequent stuff and I know them and for the less frequent I do write down other nutty ones or reuse.

    Reply
  3. Deb

    My husband works in IT and he says it’s amazing (and disheartening) how many people use 1234 or ABCD as their passwords. At my job, we’re required to change our passwords monthly and a lot of my co-workers use the month and last two digits of the year (December13, etc.). I’ve read that the best password is to use the first letters of a sentence that only means something to you (my oldest child was born in Novembet becomes mocwbiN). I figure that cyber criminals probably have programs that can try billions of random combinations in an instant, so we’re probably all screwed!

    Reply
  4. Jeff Meyerson

    Sounds familiar, Deb. When my wife was working at the District and Region levels at the NYC DOE (Dept. of Education) they also made her change her password monthly. It seemed a big waste of time then and it still does. She wans’t conducting any personal business online./

    Reply
  5. Richard

    Biometrics? So I have to pee in a cup in order to use my laptop? No, probably just give a drop of blood, like checking my blood sugar. Still, I’d rather use a password.

    Reply
  6. Murray Lindsay

    Good article. Sound advice.

    He didn’t mention the new password revelation, though. That strings of gobblygook that are totally unfriendly for humans and provide no special security in the dark magic of cracking passwords. A single “dictionary word” is no good, but apparently combining two words is the way to go, and is much easier on the human brain. For instance, George could use “big” and “orange”. Toss in a number…say the year he bought it. So “bigorange13”. Snazz it up with some uppercase action, “BIGorange13” and you have a password that brute force cracking will have to work long and hard to reveal.

    But, of course, that particular example might be unwise for George because anyone reading this blog might make a shrewd deduction without bothering with the cracking voodoo.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *