Password tips

Anyone associated with a church web presence usually has a slug of sites and passwords they need to remember.

Some cautions and tips for login names and passwords.

• Use a different login name for different web sites.
• Avoid using your real name as any part of your login name.
• Don't use the same password for multiple web sites. Use a different one for each.
• Make passwords strong (8 or more characters plus a mix of upper case letters, lower case letters, numerals, and symbols such as ^). Ideally, use 13 or 14 total characters.
• Don't use any part of your name, birthdate, pets names, etc. in your password -- nothing a criminal could pull from some part of the web (including a social media profile you think is "locked down").

To help you remember passwords, use a long passphrase, then adjust for the character mix as above. A password/phrase that is at least 13 characters is very hard to crack.

Example: Thyrpualptaftcmaa is the first letter of each word in the prior paragraph's first sentence. We can then adjust that and change some to characters, insert numerals, and remove a couple letters to set the total here to 14: ThYrPu^13ptae$

If you feel the need for good password manager software, stay tuned for a future post "Managing a lot of passwords".