Password Protecting With 1Password

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With more and more people going online, the amount of information online that is vulnerable to theft/hacking rises daily.  You would be in shock to know how many people use easy to guess passwords, and they use the same password EVERYWHERE!   It’s insane, maybe you’re even one of those people, you need to drop everything right now and continue reading.

I can only think of one reason why people use the same password over and over again and put themselves at huge risk of losing so much.  That one reason is so they can remember their password, is that it?   Is that the ONLY reason so many people foolishly wait for someone to hack their accounts?  I have so many different ways to remember passwords, why on this earth would you use an easy to guess password over and over?

I have worked with hundreds of fortune 500 companies working on Identity Management and the amount of trouble passwords cause and managing them is costly.  All too often people use bad passwords, the same ones, and I had to implement systems to stop people from doing that.

What Do You Have Online?

So what information do you have online, have you thought about it, what you could lose if someone got any of this information?

• Financial Information, Banks, Credit Cards.
• Accounts with Paypal, EBay, Expedia, Airlines, all sorts of places where you can spend your money.
• Blogs, Forums, places people can go and impersonate you.
• Government websites where you file taxes and other government documents.
• Online business, affiliate accounts, your own blog, delete your data, steal your data, your customer information.
• ??? so many more.

Bad Passwords

So what are bad passwords, here is a shortlist of things you don’t want:

1. Dictionary Words
2. Words from movies, games, if it’s a word of any kind, it’s no good
3. Short Passwords (8 characters or less)
4. The same password over and over again (even if the password itself is a ‘good’ one)

A quick story about myself, I’ve had my EBay and Paypal account hacked.  I had them linked together, and I used a dictionary word as my password.  Obviously someone guessed it, or sniffed it somehow.  I hadn’t shared it with anyone, it was the same password I had used for years on every account I had ever made (worst thing I could possibly do).  I log in randomly one day as I’m not a regular user of Ebay and I see I’ve happily purchased a $500 Sony Ericsson mobile phone which is being shipped to Indonesia from London.   I go look into my account, they had changed the email address to their own, and some of the address information.  They paid for it using my paypal account since it was linked.  Now it wouldn’t have mattered if it wasn’t linked, I broke another rule and had the same password on  Paypal too.

The Password Solution

Get a program for your machine to generate and store your passwords.  I use a Mac and use a program called 1Password.  It generates completely random text passwords of whatever length I specify and stores them on my machine.  Everytime I create a new account I use a different (new) password which is impossible to guess.  Those passwords are stored in 1Password.  When I come back to this site, 1Password logs me in as it remembers my name and password for that specific site.

If someone were to somehow get that password (impossible to guess) it’s only good for ONE account, not all of my accounts.

The one danger in doing this is all your password information is now stored on your computer, so you MUST back this information up.  You should be backing up your computer as it is, and if you’re not, I won’t get started on that now, but GET ON IT!

There are other options for Windows, I believe Roboform is a very popular application for Windows.   So if you don’t have something like this, get it now, and start using it, start changing your passwords, it’s insurance you want to have.

Comment below, are you afraid of your online information being hacked?

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Tags: Howto, Tips, Tools