Personal Passwords

To help you jump start the new year, we’re posting thirty-one technology and business treats, one for each day of January.

Now that we’re into the second week of the New Year, it’s time to get down to serious geek business. Today we’re going to tackle passwords for your personal stuff. You guessed it. Tomorrow we’ll talk about operational practices for passwords in business.

Personal passwords are an essential aspect of online security. Industry experts agree that passwords for sensitive information, like financial and medical, really should be changed frequently, at least quarterly, preferably monthly. Passwords also should not be written down or shared. And a combination of numbers and upper and lower case letters strengthen the password.

There are several apps available to help generate passwords and/or store passwords. However, it is still a pain to manage passwords, even if you’re using the same password for everything which is NOT a good idea!

A New Year is a great time to establish a NEW best practice and CHANGE all of your passwords! It’s empowering, you’ll easily remember, and you wrote have to write down anything.

1. Establish a base: Pick a word and set of numbers that are unique to you. For example, you could use your last name and date of birth of your first born. If that’s what I chose, mine would be: fouquet0219

2. Use something from the site that requires a password. This will give you a unique password for every site and will totally eliminate the need to manage your passwords. Let’s say I need a password for the Zappos site, http://zappos.com. I could pick the first three letters (zap) OR the last three letters (pos). Whichever I picked, I would add that to my base: zapfouquet0219 OR fouquetzap2019 OR fouquetZaP0219 OR … You get the idea. The point is to establish a scheme from the site’s URL that can be adapted to your base.

3. For passwords that should be changed monthly or quarterly, like financial or medical, you will want to add something to your base and scheme that will be easy to manage. Let’s say I want to change my American Express password quarterly. My base is fouquet0219. My scheme is aMEx. I might add 1201 (for year and quarter). So a possible password might be 1201fouquetaMEx0219. I now have a system that will work for however long I have that account.

Of course, this is just a suggestion. Prior to this year, I used an iPhone app to manage my passwords. It was tedious and I rarely changed my passwords because it was so tedious and time consuming. Once I established my base and scheme, it has been easy to change my passwords and remember them! Whether you use an app or system, the main thing is to change your passwords! Don’t write them down on paper. Make sure they’re a combination of numbers and upper and lower case letters.

Now, it’s your turn!