Password protection made easy

by Michael Donkin | The IT Dept

The hacking of the Sony PlayStation Network has been all over the news recently. In short, the details of around 75 million User Accounts were stolen in a sophisticated hack of the Sony system, leading to the loss of email addresses, names, postal addresses, passwords and Credit Card info, (although Sony says the Credit Card details were encrypted.)

Another database which was hacked last month, with much less publicity, was that of a company called Epsilon. You won't have heard of Epsilon, but they almost certainly have your details on file. Epsilon are a major Email Marketing company, who are used by several large organisations to send legitimate marketing emails to customers. Epsilon sent 40 BILLION emails last year! The loss of their database will mean that you will see an increase in targeted spam emails, as your email address and real name would have been on the lost database. (See our Blog at http://goo.gl/oWnsE for further details.)

How can you protect yourself from the growing incidence of such hacks?

Many people only have one password for all of their online activity, so losing your email address and password could be disastrous.  One of the most sensible ways is to use a "complex" password of about 8 characters, and have a different password for each website that you deal with. A complex password is built up with CAPITAL letters, lower-case letters, numb3rs and pun&tuat!on marks, such as P4ssw0rD!  But, how would you ever remember several such passwords?

A simple solution

Decide on a random word which will form the basis of all of your passwords. But that word shouldn't be a real word or name which is associated with you in any way, or able to be guessed. So, let's put that into practice.

At school I really liked a girl called Carol, (although I never dared tell her so!) So the basis of my randomly generated passwords shall be "arol".  I'll now add both punctuation and a number  - arol9!  To make it unique, to each and every web site that I use, I shall add the first 2 letters of the name of the company operating that web site to the front of my new password in Capital Letters.  So, if I am dealing with Amazon, I would create the unique password of AMarol9!
Ebay is given EBarol9!
Marks and Spencer gets MAarol9!
The IT Dept = THarol9!

I have quickly and simply created an infinite number of exceptionally strong passwords which are extremely memorable.

Michael Donkin is the Director of the IT Dept -
Based in Chorley, the company provides professional, fast and efficient computer support services to businesses across Lancashire.

share this post