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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Passwords


A password is typically your key to get into most areas of cyberspace. We have one for email, social networks, bank websites, etc. Since we have so many of them, it’s tempting to use the same password for pretty much everything and keep them short so you can remember them.  However these are two things you should NOT do.

Think about this scenario. You use the same password for banking as you do for your personal email account. That personal email account provider gets hacked and millions of email addresses with passwords get leaked. Now malicious people have your email address and password. The person logs into your email account and sees what banking institution you work with, goes to the institution’s website and logs in using your email address and password that was leaked from the email hack. You are now the victim of identity theft and probably a lot more.

Never use the same password for multiple accounts. At the very least use different passwords for your email, social networks and banking websites. You also want to make the password difficult for hackers to break. This means at least 8 characters (preferably more), upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters (@ # $ are some examples).

A list of common passwords to avoid are:

password

Password123

qwerty

123456

abc123

One other item to note is to periodically change your password. If there was a cyber-attack against a company that you log into and they didn’t announce it yet, changing your password could prevent future headaches before they happen.

Jeff Willard
MCC Cyber Security Awareness Committee
10/13/2014