Cybersecurity for Small Business

Passphrases and Your User ID!! In our last article we spoke of the “new thinking” of passphrases instead of passwords and we explained how difficult, if not impossible, it is for even a computer to guess your passphrase when it’s larger than 24 or 28 characters. This short article wants to discuss “login credentials”.   Login credentials is defined as both your user-id and passphrase.   (There may be a 3 rd credential, but that’s for another article.) You’ve heard the expression, it takes two to tango.   In other words, a passphrase and user-id must be correct and must be for one another before you are allowed access. So, perhaps your user-id is more important than many had thought previously!    For those sites that allow you to pick your user-id and passphrase, think of each as a security key. Now, what should one use as a user-id?   That’s really up to you, but you can make it easy to remember by using a combination of your nickname, street name, account purpose and/o

Are Passwords on their way out? Passwords are a major part of our lives AND we have numerous (some say countless) amounts of them.    They are the keys to our “electronic” locks.   Trouble is, our keys are so easy to copy or guess, we might as well not have the locks!     Why do we need and have so many different passwords?   Because almost every one of the sites requiring a password has a different rule set for creating a password.   Many require an uppercase character or a lowercase character or must have a number or must have a special character AND cannot be a password you have chosen in the past 45 years!        Because we have so many sites where we need passwords, we try to make it easy for us to remember them.   Trouble is, if it’s easy for us to remember, it’s easy for the bad guys to guess.   Did you know that the most common passwords are:   Password, Password123, admin, welcome, letmein, QWERTY, QWERTY1234, 123456 and 123123.   So what do many of us do w