29 January 2009

Thinking about security

A number of people in Stratford have had money stolen from their accounts as part of a large debit card scam. Even some people I know from the House of Blessing.

It has me thinking about passwords and such. As much as I am pretty geeky and like to think I am smarter than the average computer user, I have to admit that I use some pretty common passwords for just about everything. (not exactly the same, I'm a little smarter than that) So as of today I am going to change my system up. One of my favorite sites is LifeHacker.com - they have many articles on various software that can help create and keep passwords, this particular one seemed make sense to me:
You don't need to remember 100 passwords if you have 1 rule set for generating them. One way to generate unique passwords is to choose a base password and then apply a rule that mashes in some form of the service name with it. For example, you may use your base password with the first two consonants and the first two vowels of the service name. Say your base password is "asdf." (See how easy those keys are to type?). Then your password for Yahoo would be ASDFYHAO, and your password for eBay would be ASDFBYEA.
I'm also going to try out KeePass to help me remember the new passwords. I'll post a review of that once I have played around with it.

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