A New Year’s Resolution to Keep

It’s that time again … time to make resolutions designed to make us a better person in the New Year. People everywhere are promising to lose weight, get organized, exercise more and eat a healthier diet. However the odds are that by the end of January most resolutions will be nothing but a faded memory. According the the New York Times, “By Jan. 8, some 25 percent of resolutions have fallen by the wayside. And by the end of the year, fewer than 10 percent have been fully kept.”

I have a suggestion for a New Year’s resolution that all of us, including myself, should make and promise to complete in early 2018 – change all our online passwords.  They should all be changed on a regular basis, at least every three to six months, and with all the recent cyberattacks, this advice could not be more relevant. It is very important to use strong passwords, and to use different passwords for every password protected website and app. 

What is a strong password? One that is difficult for another person, or computer, to guess. Characteristics of a strong password are:

• A minimum of 8 characters.
• A mix of uppercase and lowercase letters.
• A mix of letters and numbers.
• The inclusion of at least one special character such as @, #, $, %, ?.
• One that is not written down on a piece of paper. 

A good password needs all of these characteristics plus one more thing. It needs to be easy to remember, and thus you should create passwords that can be remembered with a mnemonic. A mnemonic is a memory tool that aids in remembering information – an example of a mnemonic is ROY G BIV for the colors of the visible spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) or the rhyme we all learned to remember the number of days in each month of the year (30 days hath September …).

Before you can create a strong password, you should have an idea of what constitutes a weak password.  Some examples of weak passwords are:

• Single words that can be found in the dictionary, in any language.
• A single word with some of the letters replaced by numbers (e.g., pa33w0rd).
• A repeated character or a series of characters (e.g., AaAa, 12345, abcde).
• The name of a family member, pet, or famous person.
• Numbers based on family members ages and birthdays. 

A few ideas for creating strong passwords are:

• Think of a sentence and use the first letters of each word, substituting numbers for number words, adding a special character and using one or more uppercase letters. (e.g., I am trying to think of a good password and my brain is mud = iaT2T0agp&mbim).
• String together three or more words that do not make any sense together (e.g., bird tractor citizen, adding a number or two, an uppercase letter and a special character = biRd#trActor3ciTizen).
• Add “padding” to make a password longer. Padding is a series of keystrokes that would not in themselves make a good password, but can be added to good passwords and make them better. (e.g., !!!!goOD59road)))!?).

Naturally, you can make a very secure password by stringing together random letters, numbers and special characters, but such a password would be impossible to remember. Even using the mnemonic tricks listed above, remembering all your necessary passwords can be extremely challenging. The solution is to use a password manager, a topic that will be covered in next week’s OnMouseClick.

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy and password protected 2018. The online version of OnMouseClick can be found at onmouseclick.blogspot.com.