I imagine when the dementia starts to set in a few years down the road, I’ll just start blithering passwords. It seems everything I do is password related. Email, Twitter, Facebook, online accounts, pin numbers. Sometimes it gets to be too much, and like most people, I occasionally get a little lazy and use a weak password.
Earlier this week, I realized that someone was posting as me on my Twitter account. Unfortunately, instead of posting valuable information, they were posting links to material I didn’t want to promote, so I deleted their posts and changed my password. And hopefully anyone who follows my Twitter account didn’t really think I was promoting get-rich work-at-home schemes. The incident forced me to re-evaluate my password strategy. So now, my passwords are longer and have more *&%^ characters and will be changed more often. Below are some other practices I will follow and recommend.
Five best password practices
- Change your passwords often.
- Make them hard to guess. Use at least 8 characters in your password. Don’t use words or names, use a nonsensical set of characters
- Make them hard to find. If you must record them (and you will unless you have a better memory than most) put them in a secure location — not on a sticky note on your computer monitor. If you store them electronically on your computer — make sure they are not accessible. Lock them up whether paper or electronic based.
- Don’t use the same password on all your accounts.
- Don’t share your password with other people. Don’t email your password. If you must have your password emailed to you because you forgot it, change it as soon as you log in.