Netco newsletter December/January 2007

this issue:
Protect yourself with simple password tricks | Make e-mail earn its keep | How To make sense of your Web site‘s activity

Staying private

Protect yourself with simple password tricks

When I was a kid we left the house key under our back door mat. In 20 years of the practice, no one ever burgled the family home.

These days, the equivalent of a naïve trust in a doormat to keep things secure has gone electronic. People will dead-bolt their doors but still leave passwords to their Internet activities flapping on the air-conditioning breeze on yellow post-it notes or they use their first name or (yes, this really happens), “password” as the entry to their on-line possessions.

Back in the eighties, when EFTPOS arrived, it‘s likely you had only one to remember and that was only 4 numbers. These days, many people have a dozen or more that matter and others that get used once and discarded.

It‘s not silly to protect your on-line life with passwords that defy a pattern. Your credit card information, personal information, bank accounts, Trade Me access and all manner of things you use every day are kept from being public items only by imaginative and unique passwords. Cunning people have written programmes that attempt (often successfully) in deducing passwords. If you share the same password across all your accounts, cracking one gets someone into your electronic life in the worst possible way.

It‘s difficult to remember many passwords but persevere, with characters other than a-to-z. Try mnemonics: my own cat‘s name is bob and he is black, would be “mocnibahib”. It‘s not bad, but still just a-z. Confuse it more. Use an ampersand instead of ‘and‘. Capitalise the cat‘s name and substitute a zero for the letter o: m0cniB&hib. On-line password systems usually treat upper and lower case letters as distinct so even mixing cases is better than a plain word. ‘Passw0rD‘ is inadequate but still better than ‘password‘. Toss in some numerals and shifted characters and you‘re starting to protect yourself better. Be cautious when you let Internet Explorer ‘remember‘ your user name and password. Never, ever select that option when at a public Internet kiosk.

Password protection extends to more than banks and Web sites. Anyone using wireless access at home really should use protection or risk letting any passer-by with a wireless device into his or her network. If you carry a laptop or PDA consider what you‘d lose if you lost it and it wasn‘t protected by a secure password. On a laptop, set a password in the bios which prevents the computer starting up at all without the correct password. Your laptop‘s manual tells you how.

People who run Web sites can often read your password in plain characters behind the scenes so, if you sign up to a new site, don‘t type in a password and user name that you use everywhere else. Your private electronic world would be opened to them if they were dishonest.

At a technology conference recently in the USA, a session entitled, “Privacy is dead”, an expert asked the name and age of a conference participant and, before the session ended, he had the man‘s financial history, his relatives‘ names, his schooling record and his social security number. He was even able to tell the dumbfounded participant that someone else had been illegally using his social security number in another state for nearly twenty years!

Against an expert like that you may not have a chance to hide but secure passwords certainly give you a fighting edge against casual snoopers.

this issue:
Protect yourself with simple password tricks | Make e-mail earn its keep | How To make sense of your Web site‘s activity