Passwords

[Jazzy]

Passwords help protect some of our most personal information, but often times they don't actually end up being that personal — making them very easy to circumvent.

NordPass, a company that helps users generate passwords and keep them secure, has put out its annual list of common passwords, and it shows that many are lacking creativity.

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How confident are you that your password/passwords is not easy to circumvent?

Do you use the same password for all of your online activity?

 

[Stravinsk]

Very confident.

When I create an account for something, I bring up a separate file to record the information. That file is saved before I actually create the account. The password can be basically anything that I don't need to remember. For example: 45.XEe-tryyytiP&dr*s.?!sym Then it's just a matter of copying that text and creating the account. The saved file is moved into an encrypted drive I know a much simpler password to.

 

[Lamb]

Some of my passwords are generated by the system and aren't words, so I have to keep track in a spreadsheet. They can't be guessed and really can't even be remembered.

 

[tango]

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How confident are you that your password/passwords is not easy to circumvent?

Do you use the same password for all of your online activity?

I have a few accounts with the same password - these are for the kind of sites where it makes little to no difference if the account is compromised.

Anything that matters has a password that's a jumble of letters. The jumble means something to me but if you looked at it the chances are you'd never guess it.

Ironically a lot of the enforced "secure" passwords can make things less secure. If I'm allowed a long password that's only lowercase letters I can choose something like "foursillyhorseslaughing", which is long enough to take an age to guess while also being memorable enough that I won't forget it (which is a key attribute). If the system requires uppercase, lowercase, numbers and squiggly things then I end up with a password like "f0urSillyHor5es!" and then end up forgetting which letters got turned into numbers, what squiggly I put on the end and so on. If people are forced to use a password that looks like someone sneezed and tried to spell the sound it made the chances increase rapidly that they'll write it on a sticky note under the keyboard or something, which defeats the point entirely.

The last place I worked full time required passwords to be changed every 30 days, wouldn't allow a password to be reused for a year and required combinations of character types. So I ended up with MyPassword01, MyPassword02 etc (except MyPassword was the password I wanted to use, not that literal string).