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- Feb 15, 2012
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Active accounts here are vulnerable to hacking, if you use a weak password.
Once someone gets in using your credentials, they are acting as yourself, and could make compromising or even scamming posts, using your good name.
A password with only six lower case letters, especially if it uses words (your cat's name), is crackable in minutes. Do you really want your personal email accounts accessible to strangers?
I would make the fervent suggestion that for passwords, all of them for that matter, not just email passwords you use:
Take "hike quitter zippy", and change it to => hikke21qUitter^%xippy
A password with the above characteristics is many quadrillion times more secure than a six character password of only lower case letters, which makes it essentially uncrackable by dictionary or brute force attacks. Yet it is much easier to remember than a completely random string of characters.
Consider using a password manager, like Lastpass, that can create high security passwords that you don't have to memorize. Not a perfect solution either, but much better than using "mypassword" or your birthdate, for all of your logins.
That is good sense not just for PiperForum, but for your general safety and security as well, everywhere on the net and at home.
* Orest
Once someone gets in using your credentials, they are acting as yourself, and could make compromising or even scamming posts, using your good name.
A password with only six lower case letters, especially if it uses words (your cat's name), is crackable in minutes. Do you really want your personal email accounts accessible to strangers?
I would make the fervent suggestion that for passwords, all of them for that matter, not just email passwords you use:
- minimum length of 15 characters
- use no single recognizable word, even if it is obfuscated. ("O" to a zero, etc.)
- instead use a pass "phrase", a string of several short words as a nonsense sentence, adding some minor spelling errors
- use upper (not the first character) & lower case letters
- add some numbers and at least one special character
- do not use the same password for multiple accounts
Take "hike quitter zippy", and change it to => hikke21qUitter^%xippy
A password with the above characteristics is many quadrillion times more secure than a six character password of only lower case letters, which makes it essentially uncrackable by dictionary or brute force attacks. Yet it is much easier to remember than a completely random string of characters.
Consider using a password manager, like Lastpass, that can create high security passwords that you don't have to memorize. Not a perfect solution either, but much better than using "mypassword" or your birthdate, for all of your logins.
That is good sense not just for PiperForum, but for your general safety and security as well, everywhere on the net and at home.
* Orest
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