Ask
Reply
Solution
Hi.
After reading the media piece titled "How to pick the perfect password" from BBC Tech News found here I thought I'd both share the link and bring this to the eForum members to digest.
Excerpt " On Tuesday, the UK government agency GCHQ published new password guidance designed to "improve security, while improving the usability of systems.
Its report challenged some common ideas about passwords and security. So how do you choose, and just as importantly remember, the perfect password? Many websites demand complex passwords with a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
The GCHQ report suggested complex passwords may actually be counterproductive, because people often write them down or reuse the same one on many websites."
My Thoughts :
This prompted me to think how often I personally change the Passwords I use and how often I change them. And if any were duplicated for others places.
One option I use is called 1Password "1Password creates strong, unique passwords for every site, remembers them all for you, and logs you in with a single tap."
Also my 'iCloud Keychain' comes into play to remember my Passwords for me making it easier to log into places.
Another Excerpt from the link says ""Passwords are rarely cracked by brute force. They are mostly captured through phishing and malware, and with those attacks it does not matter how long or complex your password is." which brings a little balance to the piece.
Like many others I also follow general advice not to perform actions such as Internet Banking / using PayPal on Public WiFi.
How do you choose to protect yourself.
Picture courtesy of the BBC Tech Page.
Personally I use Lastpass. I use it to generate very long passwords and it saves them in a vault. It works perfectly well on Macs and PCs and in different browers. it also lives on my phone and for $12 a year it will sync across all devices.
There's also too much caution that leads to an over enthusiastic curtailing of online activity.
My Last pass vault has over 200 entries in it for different websites and passwords. Some of them get used every day, like this forum, and others may be a one time use. But the app allows me to securely store that information and all I have to recall is one password. And I can make that a very secure one as I only have one to remember.
Also I've been using online banking both personally and professionally for more years than I care to remember 15 at least. I couldn't imagine life without it. They don't use passwords alone but usually require some kind of security device that produces a one time code for a transaction.
I've never had a problem with hackers with online banking and I don't actually know anyone who has. It like someone who won't use a debit/credit card online for security concerns but will give it to someone over the phone for a takeaway meal.
That isn't to say that the problem doesn't exist but to cut yourself off from one of the best uses of a computer or a smartphone because of a potential issue that is probably exaggerated doesn't make much sense to me.
As a professional financial director I can assure you I was using online banking in 2000 for the business I was working for at the time.
RBS Royline was the programme in question and required it's own modem as a dial up device as his was before general ADSL always on broadband was available.
@froggerty wrote:I don't think that you can say that the App to store your passwords is completeley secure, how do you know?, is it because that's what you've been told or just believe it is?
Of course it's what I've bene told, read about and researched.
What about cloud storage? Do you avoid that as well?
Absolutely.
I have multiple cloud based storage facilties on tap.
Monstercloud gives me a constant on the fly backup on multiple machines - currently storing 398.01GB
Photos get uploaded to Google Photos and personal One Drive
All docs and photos are also on my Office 365 One Drive account. I also have two external hard drives giving a physical backup of two machines.
