It is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) and I thought I will share some of the ways I protect my information. Spoiler alert: you may not find anything that you already don’t know and I may have written about these earlier. And if you came to the event at Wellesley last Friday, you already heard about these from me. But I hope this serves as a good reminder about some of the best practices for keeping your information safe.

Passwords & Passphrases

I use fairly long and complex passwords. I prefer passphrases wherever they are supported. It is so sad that so many systems still do not support passphrases and are restrictive in terms of the length of the passwords. As a rule, I use different passwords for different systems. I will be very happy to privately share with anyone who is interested in knowing more about how I maintain/remember all of these passwords. I also avoid saving passwords for some of the critical systems and financial institutions in my browser’s password manager. They are safe and continue to be safer, but, if ever someone steals my Google Password AND bypasses two factor authentication, they will have access to all my passwords (paranoia!).

To change the passwords often or not is an age old question and I believe that having a long and hard to guess password is much better than changing passwords often. One of the reasons for mandating the password change was that if hackers had access to your password, changing it prevents them from accessing your data and that it is hard for them to guess your new password. With the exponential increase in computing power, the moment your password has been hacked, a lot of your information has already been accessed before you can change the password. Secondly, it has been shown that mandatory password changes result in predictable password patterns that are easier to guess than one can imagine. I encourage you to read this article “Time to rethink mandatory password changes” on this subject. So, my advice – make passwords long and hard to guess.  (more…)