New Year Resolution

Every year as we approach New Year it’s com­mon to look back and review pat­terns and behav­iours of the past year.
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!