What do these three factual events have in common:
Nude photos stolen from women’s e-mail accounts.
A Minnesota man used his neighbor’s WiFi network to send threatening emails to Vice President Biden.
1.3 million accounts easily hacked at Gawker.com.
Each of these were made possible because people used weak passwords. In the gawker.com hack, many of the passwords the hacker found were as simple as “123abc”, “password”, and “cheese.”
I know passwords can be a pain to use and remember, but in many cases it is our only line of defense. I am about to share with you my old password. Here it is – IRLHDICbikgu$$.
Why am I sharing one of my old passwords with you? To show you what a strong password looks like and that it does not have to be hard to create one and remember it.
This password may seem like it is hard to remember, not for me. There is nothing special about me. You can do the same thing. All I did was take the first letter from each word in a sentence that meant something to me (which makes the password easy to remember). I made some of the letters upper case and some lower case and then added two dollar signs on the end.
You can create similar STRONG passwords for yourself using a sentence that means something to you . After you use your new strong password a few times, it will be a breeze to remember and using it will be second nature.
Here is the sentence I used to create my old password.
I Really Love Haagen Dazs Ice Cream but it keeps going up $$
Again, taking the first letter of each word in the sentence, making a few of them uppercase and lowercase and adding the dollar symbols at the end results in this:
IRLHDICbikgu$$
Use the link below to see if the passwords(s) you are currently using is considered strong or not.
Password Checker at Microsoft.com-
https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx?WT.mc_id=Site_Link
MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/213679/gawker_hack_exposes_ridiculous_password_habits.html
Happy Computing,
TechJones
