{"id":7368,"date":"2014-04-12T06:59:56","date_gmt":"2014-04-12T10:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=7368"},"modified":"2023-09-27T07:27:38","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T11:27:38","slug":"play-the-password-game-you-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/play-the-password-game-you-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Play the Password Game: You Win!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Let’s Play the Password Game<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

With all the brouhaha over the Heartbleed Bug and other known and unknown threats, the only thing you can do is make sure you’re using nothing but strong passwords — and change them frequently. Yes, it’s a hassle, but not nearly as big of a hassle as having your bank account cleaned out or your identity stolen.<\/span><\/p>\n

And don’t even think about paying good money to use something like LifeLock to protect you. If you think of the billions of dollars they rake in, they have very little to lose by guaranteeing you they’ll pay you a million dollars if someone steals your identity. That’s like us telling you that if you create passwords by using the information in this article and your accounts are compromised, we’ll send you two cents. Even though we don’t have much money, we would never go broke making this guarantee. So don’t waste your money by using a service like LifeLock. Besides, Lifelock has been sued and lost many times for false advertising. <\/span><\/p>\n

Play it safe. Create strong passwords, change them frequently, don’t fall for Internet and telephone scams, and always be wary when dealing with sites you don’t know.<\/span><\/p>\n

We’ve beaten you over the head so many times trying to get you all to use a password manager (and we recommend LastPass, Bitwarden, or Roboform – they all have free versions and all have password generators that make creating and remembering strong passwords as easy as clicking a mouse. <\/span><\/p>\n

Alas, no matter how many times we tell you to use a good password manager, you don’t and you probably won’t. <\/span>So for those of you who want to make strong passwords but still want to remember them, here’s something to try.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let’s play the password game. OK, your dog’s name is Mookie and she’s 8 years old. You could make a password like lLuvMyM00K!3+8 Just use zeros for the letter o’s an exclamation point for the letter i in the name Mookie and the number 8. It’s a strong password; according to Bitwarden’s password strength checker<\/a>, it would take a hacker equipped with the fastest password-cracking software in the world (software that can guess billions of passwords in less than a second) 2 years to crack it.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can take any word with an S, I, E, or O, and change letters to numbers or change the case to make a pass4word you can easily remember. You can use your imagination too. <\/span><\/p>\n

$U$AN$.r3d.C0RV3TT3! is Susan’s red Corvette. It would take a hacker 28 years for a hacker to crack that.<\/span><\/p>\n

A password like l.@M.in.Miss0uri-48 — (l AM lN Missouri 48 – Your state and your age.) I hacker would be working on that for centuries before that password would crack.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

B0$T0N.$@IIY.42 (Boston Sally 42 your city, name, and age). I would take a hacker 7 years to crack that once. Not centuries, but still who spends 7 years working on cracking a password for an individual?
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

3y3.@m.Ml$T3R*JAM3$ (I am Mister James). It would take a hacker centuries to crack that password.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, you get the idea. Remember, never use the same password for every site. You can easily remember your passwords by making a list of “hints”(not your full passwords) like My State, My Car, My City, Name, and so on. Anyone having access to that list would have no idea what your passwords were, but you.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can play the password game with lots of words and combinations of words, symbols, and numbers that are familiar to you, yet when changed use the password game and make strong passwords that you can actually remember.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, we’re going to put in another plug for password managers. Passwords, strong passwords, are the only thing standing between you and criminals and hackers. Password managers like\u00a0LastPass, Bitwarden, and RoboForm, can generate and remember extremely long passwords in less than a second, they can remember them for you, and automatically fill in logins for you on-site that require you to log in.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s Play the Password Game With all the brouhaha over the Heartbleed Bug and other known and unknown threats, the only thing you can do is make sure you’re using nothing but strong passwords — and change them frequently. Yes, it’s a hassle, but not nearly as big of a hassle as having your bank account cleaned out\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,1462,1433,1656,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7368"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7368"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26909,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7368\/revisions\/26909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}