Password Security and Internet Identity Theft

Types of fraud and internet identity theft are now far more of a potential problem to us as individuals because of the issues we face in securing our passwords.

In the modern world, it is difficult to use the internet and have less than 20 passwords. You know the ones ... relating to online banking, mothers maiden name, email accounts, favourite subscription sites, ISP accounts, place of birth, travel club memberships, eBay, Amazon and many, many more. These are in addition to your pin numbers for credit, debit, store and cash cards.

If you are unlucky, you also have separate sign in details for your work or office pc. A close relative is a bank manager who informs us that she needs a shocking 11 secure passwords to access and use the company system. Many of these passwords are 8 or 10 digits long and must be changed every 30 days.

With the best will in the world, how the hell is any sane individual supposed to remember all this? More to the point, any security system is only as strong as it's weakest link. Needing to recall many varied and changing passwords is a significant weakness. This makes internet identity theft much more possible.

We are all told that to protect these passwords, we must not write them down, but instead commit them to memory. We are told to use different passwords for different accounts. Of course most online banking facilities use more than one password, in fact many use three.

However, there are ways to make passwords more secure. Firsty, do not use normal words. You may or may not know this, but it is widely believed that for the first five years of the internet, the most common password on earth was 'sex'. Hardly original.

There are programs which exist that can try every single word in a language in about 30 minutes. This means that given a day and a number of these programs for different languages, a persistent hacker could try millions of normal words to access your account. This means that it is vital to use one or more numbers in your passwords. Alas, this happens to make them much harder for you to remember too...

In other words, protecting your privacy and thwarting internet identity theft is not easy!

To see a list of the most common passwords - you will be stunned at the length of the list - just follow this link: common passwords

To read about wireless risks go to online identity theft

Read about MySpace Identity Theft and Facebook Identity Theft

Read about keystroke loggers at computer identity theft

Learn about the identity theft risk to UK homeowners as reported by the BBC.

Read about the potential dilemma for websites that try to help combat identity theft

The criminal underworld is joining forces against us. Learn about the scale of the problem at Internet crime

To go back to the start of this section: online identity theft