The Password Problem: Staying secure online

Passwords are the digital keys to our online doorways. And, like our house and other keys, it’s critical that we take care of them.

But the comparison stops there. Online security is a lot more complicated than cutting a key and remembering where you put it. Staying secure involves a range of measures to protect yourself against a worldwide hacking industry. Hackers and spammers want to steal your online identity, get into your bank account, scoop the addresses in your databases, hijack your computer to send their own spam, and much more.

A strong and secure password is a critical piece in the online security puzzle.

What makes a password secure? This article – WordPress Password Security: How to Protect Your Site & Your Digital Life – from the writers at iThemes, tells the story. It offers useful tips on how to lock down your online world, from limiting login attempts to using long passwords that don’t use real words. “Make it weird” the article says.

To that end you may want to consider Password Generator as one way of getting impossible to remember, impossible to hack passwords.

After you’ve done that, however, the trouble becomes remembering these convoluted access codes for your social profiles, email accounts and websites. The solution? An ultra-secure service to store them all. From the article:

…use a password service such as 1Password or LastPass. This is software you install on your computer that creates crazy good passwords—we’re talking up to 50 characters of truly random gibberish—and then memorizes them for you. It uses browser plugins to auto-populate those impossible to memorize passwords.

These apps can also store the passwords you make up yourself, as well as any other login credentials you need. And you can sync the data between your computer, phone or tablet and always have access.

You will need to create and remember the password for your password service software, however. And since it’s the key to your kingdom, make it a strong one!

And of course, never use the same password for more than one account.

Protecting your digital life takes time and effort. But the alternative is leaving yourself exposed to hackers. And that’s not worth it. Read the complete article for more password security tips and tricks.