Tag Archives: passwords

Its a quick one!

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Two Tips for Today:

1) If you have a password that is an actual word (or is all letters), CHANGE IT NOW.  Using what are called brute force (dictionary) attacks, a hacker can “guess” your password in seconds!

A client of ours this week had their password “guessed”, and in just a few hours the hackers/spammers sent out over 20,000 emails using our client’s email account! The result? Our client, along with the entire email server, was labeled by Verizon, Comcast, AOL, (and other services) as a spammer. It not only caused problems for that client, it effected hundreds of other clients as well.

Change your password!  Use odd characters, capital letters and numbers.  And don’t use the same password for multiple websites. A password takes about a minute to change, but could save you HOURS of frustration.

2) If you get strange emails from your friend who has an AOL email address (or yahoo or another free email service), with weird web links in that email, your friend’s AOL account was broken into and hackers/spammers are using that account to send spam.  Contact your friend immediately and tell them to change their AOL password ASAP.

OH and if you are using AOL for business email, call us today and we will get you setup with your own company email and help bring your business in to the 21st Century!  If you use AOL, you have no idea how many emails you might not be getting from your customers, clients, prospects and/or leads… In this economy, its not worth the risk to use AOL for business.

 

Online Safety – think about this long and hard…

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Are you overwhelmed with usernames and passwords for all the websites and apps you use? OR worse, do you use the SAME password for everything?

Do you think you are safe, that no one would want your information?
Think again.

If you are part of the “one password group” you really need to consider changing that practice asap. If you don’t, and your single password should somehow be compromised or stolen, someone can very easily take over your online life (and possibly even your life offline!). But how do you keep track of all your usernames and passwords? If you write them down on paper, what happens if that paper is lost or stolen?

Well let me tell you about a FREE little utility I have used for the past 5 years. It is called Password Safe. It allows you to create as many accounts and passwords as you need. It also allows you to group those passwords into categories (home, work, financial, etc…). Some people even use it to store offline information such as bank account numbers, entry passcodes, credit card numbers, you name it. Oh, did I mention that it is free? And instead of having to remember ALL your different usernames and passwords, you simply need to remember just the one.

OK, so now all your information is stored in this password safe, what if that program is broken into? Well that is where I advise you to create your own pass-phrase for your  program. Unlike a password that is normally 6 to 8 characters, a pass-phrase is normally 10, 15 or even 20 characters. It could be a line from a favorite song with a slight twist; you want to replace some letters in the phrase with odd characters that only make sense to you.

So for instance, the following song line: “If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane”, could become the pass-phrase “If w@ w@r@nt *ll cr*zee we wood go inS*ne”… At first glance, pass-phrases look difficult to memorize, but they really aren’t; especially if you are using it daily. The best part is that while an 8 character password can be broken quite easily with today’s fast computers, a strong pass-phrase might take months to decode using a computer and a brute force attack.

So today’s quick tip, try Password Safe (by the way did I mention, its free!)…
And no matter what, think hard about upgrading to pass-phrases instead of passwords.

To get Password Safe, click here (its free)