Today password is very important to secure your private data and information. It is commonly used for authentication, gaining access to a resource, or to perform some other task. If a person gets access to your email account; he may need to have a password for supervising the account. However, sometimes it happens that you have a password but no access to the email account. Thus, if a person steals your password, he may cause damage to your email account and to your own reputation. Good email security practices will restore the honor of your name and integrity.
A secure password is formed by capitalizing the letters of the word, stripping off the unnecessary characters, such as the period, dash, underscore, and asterisk; then adding numbers, one at a time, according to their count. So, an effective password is a combination of letters, numbers, and characters. However, a six or eight-character password is quite difficult to remember them. Therefore, I suggest that you use a password manager program, if you have one, to manage your passwords.
A good example of such a program is Password Manager Plus, made by Microsoft. Several good programs are PasswordSafe, RoboForm, and DashLane. If you are still using a website that uses WinZip, SaveVReg, or DidiZini, you should change to Google Mail, based on the fact that all your passwords are encrypted.
A Secure Password
A secure password should never be something that can be easily determined by anyone. It should be a sequence of characters that cannot be guessed easily. Look for words that are very hard to guess and which are unique.
A Good Question to Ask Yourself
If you have a secure password that you want to share with others, there are several questions you should ask yourself before you actually use the password:
- Does the password deserve to be handling data that can be easily accessed by intruders?
- Do I really need to write this password down, in order to remember it?
- Am I attaching this data permanently, or just for a short time, so that I can later access it?
If you answered YES to any of these questions, then you need to change the password you have created.
Otherwise, if you want to share your password too, then you will need to ask yourself some questions:
- Does the password deserve to be sending data to another person, in full privacy?
- Is it a one-time use, to badge yourself for future use?
- Has it been lapsed time and time again, because you don’t want to bother to renew your password?
You can also use this technique if you want to bookmark a specific URL for your e-mail. Instead of typing http://www.abc.com/doc/mypage.htmlyou can just copy&paste the URL into your address bar.
Kaspersky Internet Security allows you to choose from multiple-choice questions to strengthen your password:
- Do you really need to change your administrative password?
- Before you change your password, enter one right now, and check it:- Does it clearly show up on the website, or only on your manual entry?
- Do you really need to write this password down? If you are writing it down, keep it in a safe place. Electronic copies are easily contraband nowadays.
As you can see, the questions are formulated so that you will be forced to select the right answer each time. It is rare that an attacker will spot the mistake, and will therefore not be able to intercept your password.
Conclusion
A solid password should cover as much subject matter as possible. It should consist of a sequence of characters but you should not choose a word (as in ‘I am a very important password’, which is easily comprehensible) and you should not use a common word for other purposes, too. The sequence of characters should be different every time, but not too different, that is, you should not use letters-only or numbers-only.
The choice of questions and their answers is also important. You cannot expect a human to remember a ton of passwords, so it is important to choose something that is not likely to campaign over and over again. Store your passwords in an encrypted file or database (but not permanently), so that even if it sags by, you will not be able to retrieve them with an automated hackerhelp feature.
While writing this article, I realized that one of the safest ways to protect my passwords is not to write them down at all. Then, I started to get insecure about my passwords. I realized that unless I am 100% sure of the specific website I am visiting, it is better to enter the data manually than to write it in a document that can be hacked or compromised.
