From The Geek Desk Password possibilities

by Jeremy dePrisco

Weatherly, was chosen as the 7th grade Student of the Month. Kyle is a member of the Weatherly Area Middle School Basketball Team, Weatherly Biddy Basketball League and Weatherly Little League Baseball. Kyle also plays on a travel baseball team and volunteers at the Beaver Meadows Food Pantry.

Kassandra Hibbler, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Hibbler, Weatherly, was chosen as the 8th Grade Student of the Month. Kassandra plays Soccer and is a member of the Weatherly Area Middle School Reading Olympics Team. She also participates in competitive archery at West Penn, volunteers at Christmas in the Park and child sits for her cousin.

I thought I’d start this column with everyone’s favorite topic: passwords. Let’s review a few best practices for selecting a password. With a little forethought, you can save yourself some time and make the process less difficult for yourself. Gone are the days of our old standby “abc123”. In addition to numbers and capital letters, most gadgets and applications require a password with a “special character,” that is, some sort of symbol that is not a letter or a number. These are typically found by using the SHIFT key on your keyboard in combination with a number or other key. But “Abc123!” is still not good enough. In fact, please don’t use any form of “abc123” for anything, as it is one of the first passwords hackers will try.

Due to the sophistication of hacking technologies, short passwords are giving way to pass phrases or even sentences. More characters means more combinations that a computer hacking program has to try. A passphrase might be something like “IloveMyDogFido95#” or “WhenInRomeEat$100Pizza”. While these may seem hard to remember because they are longer, they actually become easier to remember because they are more conversational.

Sometimes folks try to overthink this process, and end up locking themselves out of things they need to access. If you really like

Fido and pizza, then you are more likely to remember the above examples over something more cryptic like “$h$h#nn#@”. Keep it simple, and don’t overthink it.

One 2017 study found that “the average American Internet user has 150 online accounts.”* How does one manage that many passwords? One strategy is to use the same password for all of your sites. That may seem like a good idea at first, but it leaves you open to security breaches if that one password is discovered. Sites often require you to change passwords after a certain amount of time, so it’s not likely you’ll be able to keep them all in sync for long. Another solution is to have only a few that you use, and have the passwords themselves contain something that reminds you of the site for which they are used. For example, you might use “Welikebanking99#” as the password for your bank site, but “Welikeshopping99#” for your online shopping sites.

What about password saver apps? To be honest, in 30 years of computing in many different environments, I’ve never used them and never trusted them. Recent breaches at some of those companies seem to support my position, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. Using the method above, tying the site type to the password I use, I am able to easily recall most of the passwords I use on a regular basis. As I get older, that may not always be the case, so I do keep a log elsewhere (not online).

I also highly recommend never saving passwords in your browser. For people who do not share their computer, and who don’t travel much, saving passwords in the browser might not be too risky. However, for those working on shared devices, or those that travel, this habit can get you into trouble. Even if the browser saves your password in an encrypted form, there have been cases where browser flaws have been exploited to recover that information. While efforts are underway to eliminate the need for passwords to access our various devices and applications, we’re not likely to see passwords go away any time soon. If Ben Franklin were to visit us from the past, he’d probably amend his saying to, “Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and passwords.”

*SOURCE: https:// blog.dashlane.com/ world-password-day/

Questions or ideas for future topics can be sent to info@mindspeak.com.

Jeremy dePrisco is a technologist with over 30 years of experience in home computing, healthcare IT, and music technology. In the early 90s Jeremy worked in sales and wrote the Arts in Society column for Journal Newspapers.