A Reminder - Internet Safety

Let's talk passwords. Chances are it has been a while since you've thought about changing your passwords to the various sites you visit online. We all know we should do it, yet most people don't. But changing passwords addresses only part of the problem: There's not much point in switching to new passwords if they're not good ones, or if you're using the same one for every account. A realistic concern is that, when a large website you use gets hacked, an opportunistic criminal could take the leaked information - your username, email, and password - and try it out on other sites.

So what should you do? The solution is simple: change your password, often. You shouldn't keep the same email password for more than three months, at the longest, and of course, you should be using strong passwords (upper- and lower-case letters, not using words from the dictionary, using special characters like &$^#$, etc).

 Here’s what you don’t want your password to be:

■A family member’s name

■The last 4 digits of your social security number

■Password- yes, really. According to PCWorld.com, it’s the second most popular password in the list. And using “passw0rd” and substituting the zero for the “o” is just as easy to guess.

■Your date of birth or the birthday of anyone in your immediate family

■123456

Here's what you do want your password to be:

If the password field says that you need to have 6 characters, make yours 8. The more characters, the less likely it is to be guessed.
■Don’t store your many logins and passwords as a Word document on your computer. If your computer is stolen, think of what a treasure trove of information that document becomes!

■Set an automatic calendar reminder to change your passwords every three months.

■Use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. For example, if your password is your favorite food (pizza) and your birthday (October 17), instead of it reading Pizza1017, change it to: p$zzAten17. A combination of capital letters combined with symbols, letters, and numbers is much harder to guess!

Keep in mind, no strategy is foolproof, but no strategy is foolish.