Every year as we approach New Year it’s com­mon to look back and review pat­terns and behav­iours of the past year.newyear2
Tech­nol­o­gy has become com­mon place in our homes and busi­ness­es. Many of us do online- bank­ing, watch our kids at day­care on a web­cam, use our I‑Pad to access our busi­ness and per­son­al emails….or using alarm sys­tems to pro­tect our homes and busi­ness­es.  Accord­ing to an arti­cle in Newsweek, the aver­age per­son has 6.5 pass­words.  Many peo­ple that rely heav­i­ly on tech­nol­o­gy or have mul­ti­ple phones and email accounts will have even more.
How are we remem­ber­ing all these pass­words and pass codes?  In recent sur­veys it was found that many of us are NOT prac­tic­ing due dili­gence to pro­tect our­selves.  Many of us are using the same pass­word for mul­ti­ple accounts and leav­ing them unchanged for years.  The 25 most pop­u­lar pass­words in 2011 include such gems as “pass­word” and “123456,” accord­ing to an analy­sis of var­i­ous lists and data­bas­es dumped online by hack­ers this year.  We were select­ing com­mon names, numer­ic sequences and key­board lay­outs as our pass­words online.  Com­mon pass­words includ­ed “qwer­ty,” “123456” “mon­key” and “qazwsx.”  Com­bin­ing let­ters and num­bers is a good tac­tic for select­ing strong pass­words, but not when it’s “abc123,” “passw0rd” or “trustno1.” Attack­ers can eas­i­ly use pro­grams that bom­bard servers and accounts by repeat­ed­ly try­ing com­mon pass­words.  While some sites lock out users after too many incor­rect attempts, oth­ers don’t, giv­ing attack­ers all the time they need.
Anoth­er vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is that many of are using the same pass­words for mul­ti­ple ser­vices, which leaves a gap­ing hole in your iden­ti­ty and finan­cial secu­ri­ty.
Let’s all make a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion.  Let’s resolve to change our pass­words to strong alpha numer­ic com­bi­na­tions, using dif­fer­ent pass­words for each account with a com­mit­ment to change them reg­u­lar­ly.  Iden­ti­ty theft is much eas­i­er to pre­vent, than to restore once it’s stolen.  Hap­py New Year!

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Allan Baum
Security Industry veteran with over 30+ years in the industry. Founded family owned and operated Protection Plus in 1994 with his wife and has overseen its growth since. In addition to working with his wife and son, Allan has assigned the role of Chief Canine Officer to his trusted dog Waub, who joins him at the office every day.