Hey, folks! Passwords for many people are the bane of their lives. What an annoyance! I don’t know how you do it remembering passwords, but I’m not so good. So, let’s talk about how you can make your life easier but also stay safe from cybersecurity and hacking issues that are becoming commonplace in our day to day lives.
My Thoughts
Wouldn’t it be good if we could just completely do away with passwords?
Well, we’re part-way there right now, certainly with a lot of the newest smartphones, you can use biometric authentication. Whether it’s a fingerprint reader, whether it’s something that does some sort of an eye scan. But these technologies are becoming more common on our laptops, who’ve certainly got fingerprint readers, facial recognition coming through on products like Microsoft Surface.
So, the technology is improving but passwords have gone away. So, what am I going to recommend?
Well, for your passwords, the old recommendations having jumbled letters and numbers and characters and maybe a password of about eight characters long, let’s leave that behind.
A better option for a password is one that you can remember. So, unless you can remember a jumbled-up password, then think of this.
Think of passphrase, so a phrase, a number of words you could join together. It’s quite a good approach for a password.
Now, there is no set-rule of what is the best technique for a password because as soon as somebody sets a rule, then people are looking to break that particular technique. But one type of thing that could work is to have a password of a number of words, ideally random words that aren’t sort of predictable, like the lyrics of a song.
Avoid that of words that would normally go together so they’re quite random, very hard for a computer to go in and to guess your password even if it tries a million times, it’s not going to do that if you’ve used a number of disassociated words.
For me, I would tend to add in some extra elements in addition to how many words I utilise. Whether it’s a mix of numbers or something else that I remember that can go together with that password.
For having different passwords on different sites, you’ve probably heard this advice: “Don’t use the same one password in multiple places that leaves you at risk.” And the reason being, is a lot of websites get hacked, there’s a lot of compromise and if somebody guesses one password, you don’t want them to have access to absolutely everything or if they get your password through a website that was hacked and linked to your password, you don’t want them to have that carte blanche access.
So, what do you do in that case? How do you keep all your passwords different? That’s where a password manager comes in that can remember all the passwords for you. They could be as complex as you like.
If you’re very paranoid about certain sites like your core account for business access, maybe it’s internet banking, all sorts of ones.
Well, a small number of passwords you probably can remember up there, particularly if you come up with a technique to remember them and there are a whole range of those.
On my website, you’ll see some more recommendations on passwords but I do recommend considering one of these tools for storing your common passwords.
If you want to sort of write both sides and not leave it all in your head but use a tool to remember it, what you can do is store maybe, half or portion of a password in repository that is safe, not in a bit of paper on your desk or stuck to your monitor or under your keyboard, those don’t work so well. But if you do want to do that, go ahead but leave part of it in your head.
So, if somebody does get that, they don’t have the whole up.
Hey, that’s it for me. If you want to see those password tips, go to www.gorillatechnology.com/password-tips and you can find some insights there. You can follow my updates, paulspain.com/updates. Hey, I’ll be back with my next video, next week. See you, then.