I can already tell this decade will be the decade of information security, or “cyber wars” as the media sensationalizes it. With hackers in China hacking Google and many more hacking everywhere else, everyone – from private citizens to huge corporations and government agencies – is getting more concerned about their private information and how it is being protected.
Well, as it turns out, one of the best practices of securing your personal information is to create and manage multiple passwords for each account. Of course this doesn’t really protect you if, say, the entire network of the site you trust your information to gets hacked, but it’s great for protecting your accounts, if someone manages to hack only one. And believe it or not, the process of managing multiple passwords does not have to be as much of a headache as it would seem. All it takes is a smart yet subtle system.
Essential Security
If there is only one thing you must take away from this post here it is: Don’t share passwords between your email (or your bank) and last.fm. And by this I mean establish unique, higher-profile passwords for sites with your most important information. If you have a bunch of accounts that don’t contain very serious information, like your last.fm, accounts to forums, or anywhere else that likely wouldn’t have your credit card information, it’s excusable – though still not advisable – to share passwords between these.
Otherwise, if some noob hacks one of these accounts, they could then trace your email from that account, and the first thing they will do is see if the same password for the account they hacked works on your email. There is a surprising amount of people who share their email password with other more unimportant accounts; I used to be included in this group of people. It is about one of the dumbest things you can do with your information online.
The Smart System
While it is extremely important to keep in mind my advice in the point above about having separate passwords for high security information, I will now tell you of a great way to arrange one password into multiple passwords that can be used on different sites.
Start With a Keyword
This will be the main “emphasis” of your password, meaning this will essentially be how you will remember your password. Try to use a keyword that isn’t an actual word in your native language, or perhaps give it a unique spelling. Names can also be a good idea as well, but don’t be obvious as someone with your personal information could easily crack it. Remember that you can also use two keywords, particularly if they are both small in character length. For the purposes of this post, let’s say I come up with the keyword: buzzrd.
Modify the Keyword Head and Tail
Here’s the nifty part. Use elements of the account you are passwording to come up with these head and tail modifications. For example, in my last.fm account, I might make it: labuzzrdfm. However, for Meebo, I might make it mebuzzrdbo. What I did here, was take the first two characters and last two characters of the site I’m logging into, and made them the head and tail of my password.
Of course, I do not suggest using such a simple method of creating a head and tail to your password; I did that only to create a simple and clear example. A better idea would be taking the second and fourth characters of the website, or perhaps the second- and third-to-last characters of the username you are logging into. Essentially, you want to use arbitrary elements of the site and username to make each password you have unique and that much harder to crack.
I also think it’s a good idea to add numbers somewhere in your password, perhaps breaking up your keyword or maybe in between your keyword and the head and tail. I wouldn’t worry as much about using different numbers for each password as that will become exponentially harder to remember.
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