I received a more interesting than usual press release today which claimed that 45% of women and 10% of men were willing to give their password out for a bar of chocolate, purportedly for market research. I’m not going to lie, a couple of people (both family members) know my password but I purposely don’t tell my friends, but how many people know your password?
Quite scarily, I googled my password once (probably not wise) and I was surprised to see it was actually on one database of passwords for bruteforcers. I have several passwords and changing my passwords on all sites I use is too mammoth a task but if I truly were security conscious, I should probably change it or better yet have more than 3 passwords!
So, some tips for keeping passwords safe:
- Don’t tell anyone, obviously. Not your friends, family or even IT department
- Have different home and work passwords
- Use lots of passwords and a password manager, which has to be encrypted naturally. If using a password manager, I’d suggest keeping it on an internal desktop hard disk as USB pens can easily be lost! You could always use a private key, stored on another device, to encrypt/decrypt the passwords.
