Staying Safe in the Social Networks
Five years ago, things were simple on the web – you pretty much had just the one password to store for your email account. These days though it’s not uncommon to have 10 or 20 passwords created for innumerable web services you’ve signed up to. So what happens? Lots of people tend to use the very same password for all or nearly all the services they’ve signed up to. Some people may not think their Facebook member account as being majorly vital, but it is if you’re using the same password as you are for your bank account. Sure, the convenience of having to remember just a single password is compelling, but what if an individual gets their hands on that single password? That’s right, they potentially have access to all of your accounts that share that same password. And if you think they don’t know the other online services you’ve signed up to, they don’t need to. They can run web application programs which screen literally thousands of online services against your account name/password pairing that they already have.
It’s a problem, but it’s easily remedied. The truth is, you don’t need to store each and every username/password. Why? Your browser can remember this information. Be it your Yahoo Login or Email password. Just ask your browser to store each account name/password, and then setup a master password just in case a person else gets physical access to your computer. If they do have such access, they must key in the master password in order to login to any of the services you’ve signed up to. In other words, you can sign up to hundreds of services, and merely have to actually remember one single password : your browser’s master password (achieving what you desired to do in a secure way – necessitating in just one password.
When creating passwords, make them random and long, for example K94545Dcd which is a mix of lower and upper case characters and numbers. As it’s not required to remember them, be as obscure as you like. Whatever you do, don’t use normal words as your password, as these are easy to discover for 3rd parties.
