Strong Passwords Protect You From Identity Theft

Posted on June 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment

In this modern internet age, identity theft is an almost perfect crime choice for criminals. It can be done in a very clean, hands off manner. And often it can be accomplished from half way around the world.

Unfortunately, identity theft prevention is not a required course for modern life and that makes most of us vulnerable.

And one place where we are really vulnerable online is in our selection of usernames and passwords.

This is an area where you should use great care. Some websites help us by giving us tools to measure the “strength” of passwords but most sites are pretty unhelpful – letting us enter just about anything we wish for a password. And to make matters worse, most websites use your email address for your username. So you already lost half the battle at most sites in the mind of a hacker.

While you can’t control what a website uses as a username for your account, you are generally free to enter just about any characters you want as your password. Even primitive sites let you enter letters and numbers. And better sites allow you to enter punctuation style marks too – characters like $%(@*!.

So, what makes a good password?

Lots of characters, the more the better. A 15 character password will be much harder to guess than a five character password.
Mix it up – Use letters, numbers and punctuation symbols when creating your password.
Don’t use any words in your password. Dog1 is a valid password using letters and numbers but it is easy to hack. With the same four characters, d7$a is a much harder four character password to hack – but of course you will be using much more than four characters to make your password – right?
Don’t use things that are personally identifiable to you – like family names, birth dates, etc.
Don’t use the same password for multiple accounts. Although it is more work, one password per online account is much safer than one password for multiple online accounts.
Don’t use the auto save feature for passwords that is built into browsers. It is real convenient but if your computer is ever stolen, there goes your everything.
Do change your passwords periodically. Experts recommend changing your passwords every 90 days.
If you write down your passwords, keep the list in a safe place so it can’t be stolen. And when making the list, if you can come up with some sort of code to indicate what password goes with which account, you have added an additional layer of protection in case the list gets stolen.

Practice these simple steps and your online presence and financial records will be kept safe from identity theft.