Protecting Your Gmail, Bebo, Facebook and Twitter Passwords
Ten years ago, things were simplistic on the web – you often had just the one password to remember for your email account. Nowadays however, it’s not uncommon to have 10 or 20 passwords for a myriad of web services that you’re a customer of. And you can predict what happens : A good many people tend to use the same password for all or nearly all the services they’ve signed up to. Some individuals may not think their Twitter account as being hugely vital, but it is if you’re utilising the very same password as you are for your bank account. For sure, the convenience of having to remember just a single password is tempting, but what happens if a hacker gets hold of that single password? That’s right, they in theory have access to all of the servives you’ve signed up to that share that same password. If you think they can’t know the other services you’ve joined, they simply don’t need to. They can run programs which test literally tens of thousands of services and try to match your account name/password pairing that they know about.
This is a problem we all have to think about, but it is rather easily solved. In actual fact, you don’t need to store each and every username/password. Why? Your browser can store this data. Be it your Bebo Login or Email password. Ask your web browser to remember each username/password, and then setup a central password (“master password”) just in case someone else gets physical access to your computer. Physical access to your computer will still require knowing the master password to gain access to all the other passwords. So in effect, you can join dozens of web services, and merely need to remember one single password : your browser’s master password (achieving what you wanted to do in a secure fashion – involving just one password.
When creating passwords, make them long and random, for example K94545Dcd which is a mix of lower and upper case characters and numbers. As you don’t need to remember them yourself, be as random as you wish. A word of warning : don’t use dictionary phrases as your password, as these are easy to identify for hackers.
