I have stumbled across a website called PassPack (which for most users is a free online password manager. What is the solution? There are a number of them and it depends on your own circumstances (refer to disclaimer). This brings us back to the original problem that most humans don’t have an easy way to remember all of these credentials and simply writing them down – anywhere (without it being secured) – is just as bad. The “easy” solution is to have a different login ID and a different password on each site that you frequent. How concerned would be that anyone can unlock your car? Imagine for a moment that Honda had one key fob/code for all Honda Civics. You reach into your pocket for the key fob and when you press the button, not only does your car honk, flash it’s lights and unlock it’s door, but every car of the same model in the proximity did the same thing. Say that you are in the parking lot of the local mall and you’re going back to your car. However, think about if you’ve used the same password or maybe a version of it with some numbers at the end on some other site – and possibly you’ve used the same user id and the same password on other sites Perhaps it’s a message board and that you think that the impact and risk are inconsequential. Imagine that some website was hacked and that your password was exposed. Someone’s initial reaction to this might be, “Not such a big deal, the worst thing that could happen is that they could mess with someone’s profile or send nasty messages to another user.” This gave the hackers immediate access to the login passwords for a certain subset of members. That in itself is bad enough, but the problem is that this dating website did not (and I believe still does not) encrypt their member’s passwords. Intellectually, I’ve always known that this common approach to passwords is a problem, but it took a recent, real-life example to give me a wake-up call.Ī few months ago, a popular dating website was hacked. There’s an old saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and this is very much in evidence with security on the Internet. Sometimes, I would have a site where the password that I used didn’t conform to their standards, so I had a second version which was more compliant. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been as guilty about this as anyone else in the past and I had used the same password for many sites. Unless you have a photograph memory, it’s next to impossible to keep track of all of the sites that you login to. Without some mechanism to keep track of them, it’s inevitable that we have our “standard” passwords. As wonderful as this technology is, one of the biggest problems is that there are just too many passwords for us to remember. However, what this does illustrate is how lax and lazy we can be with regards to our online passwords. I certainly wouldn’t set all my cards to one PIN and then put that PIN number in my wallet, so that someone who has my wallet could have the key to all of my accounts. Hopefully, people will realize that I’m not so foolish as to have done the above. That way, all that I have to do is pull out the handy piece of paper if I can’t remember my PIN. I also don’t have a very good memory, so I tucked a note in my wallet with a sheet of paper that reads “Mr. I’m going to start off this article with some great news for everyone! I find it much too difficult to remember all the PINs for my banking cards and credit cards so I’ve decided to with one PIN number.
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