Internet Identity Theft And Password Security TipsTypes 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. Password Security Tips There are ways to make passwords more secure. Firstly, 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 (bots) 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. It is also worth noting that these passwords can check for regular number patterns. For example, if you use a date of birth as a code, how many ways of writing those numbers are there? Not many actually. If you are in the United States, you would use MM/DD/YY. In Europe, DD/MM/YY. Since there are only a maximum of 31 days in a calendar month, 12 months in a year and a range of about 80 or so years in which a person may have been born, the number of potential combinations is relatively limited (for bots). In addition, people that know you well, will be able to guess this password relatively easily. If they know when to send you a card, they may accidentally know your password! Therefore, do not use any birthdates. Nor those of your spouse or children. What about names? Too late. These bots can search for names as well. And the names of films, actors, popstars, places, records, books and much more. The hackers have also programmed bots to look for the old number substitution trick too. By switching a letter for number, for example "london" becomes "l0nd0n" you can fool people, but probably not machines. Be Random If you plan to keep a password secure, it needs to be random. That means that "qwerty" and "123456" are also out... It ought to have letters and numbers and have no relevance to anything. Ideally, some of those letters should be upper case and others should be lower case. Sorry. As for length, shorter is less secure. Therefore, aim for 8 or more digits. Email Addresses If you use one central email address, everything else is insecure if this is compromised. Therefore, guard your email security very closely. Ideally, your password ought to be different than for everything else. Getting one password should not be a key to getting them all. Compartmentalise Perhaps it is worth compartmentalising your online life and using more than one email account? Yes! Think very seriously about having three or four strong passwords and remember them. Your banking would be one. Your email account should be another. If you have payment processing details, that ought to be number three (PayPal perhaps?). The fourth password can then be used for all manner of random other things and you will be in a relatively secure position. Keeping A Note Of Passwords An issue often overlooked is death. Sorry to be so cold. But if something happens to you or a loved one, they may be unable to access a bank account, close your online access (can you imagine the financial damage that could be done if a fraudster had access to Amazon, PayPal and eBay in the weeks after a death?). This means that there needs to be some sort of physical clue to help family members crack your now ultra strong password without you. Could this be stored in a safe? With a solicitor as part of a will? Our last tip? Become Paranoid! To read more about related topics, please follow these links:
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