Passwords: How to Protect Your Digital Assets

Are Your Passwords Like a Key Under the Doormat?

The digital age has brought us countless website and smartphone applications to inform us, entertain us, make us more productive and enable us to share our lives with others. To take advantage of these digital tools, we typically need to set up an account, which involves providing some personal information and creating strong passwords for each account.

We expect our digital information to be kept secure and protected from unauthorized access. Websites use encryption and other technologies to securely transmit and store our data. And they provide a “key” in the form of a unique username and password to access our accounts. As users, we also bear some responsibility for protecting our digital information, and it starts with choosing strong credentials.

A password that is easy to figure out is like leaving the key to your house under the doormat, in your mailbox, or in any other common hiding place. It doesn’t take a particularly smart thief to find your house key in one of these spots. But the hackers that seek to steal your digital information are pretty smart, and they have powerful computer programs to figure out your login information.

Passwords the Hackers Love

A few years ago, Imperva, a data security company, studied 32 million passwords that had been accessed in a high-profile data security breach and found that the top ten most commonly used logins included:

12345
123456
1234567
12345678
123456789
password
abc123
the name of the website

You wouldn’t need a powerful computer program to guess any of those. You need to do much better than that to keep hackers out.

A Simple Strategy for Choosing Passwords

Using the same login information for all of your digital accounts, even if it is strong, is not a good idea. If a hacker gets that one password, it will open all of your accounts. Keeping separate words for each account sounds like a nightmare, but that doesn’t have to be the case. One fairly simple approach is to create a structure that you can remember and apply to each account. Here’s how that may work.

Start by creating a basic password. It should be something familiar and easy to remember, but not something easy to figure out, like your name or address. For example, let’s say you are a football fan and the Chicago Bears are your favorite team. You might create a basic code like “chibears”.

To strengthen the security of your basic login, substitute special characters for certain letters, such as 1 for i, @ for a, and 3 for e, and capitalize one of the letters. Then your basic password becomes Ch1b3@rs.

For each website account, append the first 3 letters of the website name. For example, if you are creating credentials for the Funeralwise Planner, your password would be Ch1b3@rsfun. To make it even stronger, add a couple of special characters on the end like Ch1b3@rsfun!! And you have a very strong login.

Likewise, if you are creating a password for your Amazon account, your password would be Ch1b3@rsama!!.

There are various sites online where you can test the strength of your passwords, such as
www.passwordmeter.com.

How to Keep Track of Your Digital Assets

Having a memorable pattern for your passwords is helpful, but you still need a record of your digital accounts. You can easily record them in a document or spreadsheet file by listing the website name, URL, your username, and password. For example:

Website: Funeralwise Funeral Planner
URL: https://planning.funeralwise.com
Username: myemail@gmail.com
Password: Ch1b3@rsfun!!

Of course, you need to protect your Digital Asset document with a password. All software programs, such as Word and Excel, have methods of encrypting files with passwords. Consult their help information if you are not familiar with how to protect a file.

Another alternative is to use one of the available password management tools, such as RoboForm, LastPass, KeePass, and 1Password. They offer a variety of features and are easy to use. Some are free while others are fee-based. All require you to set a master password to open your master password file. Check out the PC Magazine article for a review of Password Managers.

Contributor: Rick Paskin