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What is Mom's Password?
Fraud & Security

What is Mom’s Password?

by Barbara Bates Sedoric
written by Barbara Bates Sedoric

Let’s face it. We live in a sophisticated, technologically driven world whether we like it or not. Like most things in life, that happens to be both good and bad news. What is Mom’s Password?

But with technology comes passwords, usernames, and PIN numbers. Not only are we instructed to keep these in a “safe” place, we are challenged with the task, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, of remembering what password goes with what. What is Mom’s Password?

So how do we keep all our passwords and usernames straight while we gracefully age and our short term memories grow a bit dimmer with each passing day?

Digital assets may be important to access in order to retrieve information, secure your data, or to turn off your accounts when you die. Without the benefit of your usernames and passwords, this becomes a very complex and difficult task for your loved ones.

Consider the following:

Smartphones, voicemail, Apps, home computers, Ipads, Tablets, Kindles, office computers, On-line banking, investments, Paypal, alarm systems, cable companies, ATM, photo sharing accounts, social networks , dating sites, on-line shopping accounts, etc., etc., etc.

Each of these has a password or username or PIN that will be required in order to gain access.
It’s hard enough remembering them when you are the person who set up those passwords. Now think about what happens when you die!

  1. Do you have your passwords written down and stored in a safe place?
  2. Do your loved ones know that you have actually made a list and know where it is hidden?
  3. Have you purchased one of those Apps that takes care of storing your passwords? Even so, someone needs to “know” that you have a password storage App and will need to “know” the password in order to get into your password storage account when you become incapacitated or when you die.

 

Digital databases are a part of our financial lives. It is very important to think this through and prepare for “when” your loved ones will need access to your digital accounts. Planning for end-of-life will save your family time and reduce stress and frustration when closing down your digital afterlife.

http://www.LastingMatters.com

What is Mom’s Password?

What is Mom’s Password?

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Fraud & Security

How to Protect Yourself from Identity Theft

by Guest Blogger
written by Guest Blogger

How is identity theft committed?

Your personal information can easily fall into the wrong hands. Often, thieves search through trash for sensitive documents, but increasingly information is stolen from online sources. You might fall prey to a fraudulent phishing email that steals your information, or someone might use a “skimmer” to take your credit card number. Your information can also be leaked from companies you do business with, or hackers may access your wireless internet signal.

Your personal information can fall into the wrong hands in many ways. In the past we thought of identity theft in physical terms: someone found your Social Security number on a sensitive document in the garbage or swiped your credit card and ID from a misplaced wallet, a scam artist posing as a bill collector elicited your bank account number over the phone. But today, the majority of identity theft happens online.

How can you protect yourself from identity theft?

The most important thing to remember is to keep close tabs on all your sensitive materials. Never give out information to strangers over the phone, be cautious when shopping online and be sure to enable all your cellphone’s security features. Here are 10 ways to protect yourself from identity theft:

  • Always keep track of sensitive material
    Store your driver’s license, Social Security card, passport and other important documents in a safe place. Always shred credit card offers, bank statements and receipts. Pay attention to credit reports, bills and financial statements—don’t hesitate to contact a sender if you’re missing a bill and haven’t enrolled in paperless billing.
  • Don’t leave mail uncollected in your mailbox
    Notify your post office if you will be out of town for more than a day by placing a hold on your mail.
  • Monitor your credit score
    Most Americans rely on their credit company or bank to monitor activity, but there are other steps you can take to stay safe from identity theft. Sign up for a credit monitoring service.
  • Keep your passwords hard to guess
    Passwords that are sentences or phrases are more difficult to guess than a name or single word. Avoid sequential numbers (1234), and include at least one special character (&#@!).
  • Get two-factor authentication alerts
    Ideally, two-factor identification is another layer of security that ensures only trusted devices can access your account. Receiving these alerts from services you don’t recognize can be signs of a phishing scam or an identity thief who has signed up for these services using your information.
  • Never respond to unsolicited requests for sensitive or personal information
    Sharing your Social Security number should always be done with caution, especially over the phone. Never give out the number if you did not initiate the call, and always verify why the person needs it. Try to give an alternate form of identification if possible.
  • Know how to stay safe online
    Never share your SSN over email for any reason, only use reputable websites and avoid making purchases on unsecured networks. Seniors are particularly vulnerable to phishing schemes and other online attacks because they are less familiar with technology. Seniors should be careful not to overshare on social media. Like anyone, seniors should keep their personal documents and information secure, especially if they are in an assisted living facility or have in-home care.
  • Stay safe on public Wi-Fi
    Free public internet might feel like a blessing, but it’s also making you vulnerable to identity theft. Unencrypted public Wi-Fi is sometimes used as a hunting group for hackers who circumvent mutual authentication to collect your data and information. Always use a firewall and update sharing settings when using a public Wi-Fi network. Considering getting a VPN (virtual private network), which ensures security on a public network by extending your private network.
  • Freeze or lock your accounts
    Freezing your account with the three reporting bureaus will restrict access to your records. A credit lock is an easier alternative to a credit freeze, but with less legal protections. You can unlock a credit lock at any time on your smartphone, whereas a freeze will take more time to “thaw.”
  • Trust your instincts
    If a phone call, email, text message or website feels suspicious, don’t engage. It will be much easier for you to confirm a contact is legit than deal with the fallout of identity theft. For example, if you receive a special offer from your bank and it doesn’t feel right, you should call them to confirm it’s not a phishing scam.

Articled shared by ConsumerAffairs.com

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How to Manage Your Passwords
Tech Support

How to Manage Your Passwords

by Steve Black
written by Steve Black

Yesterday we taught you how to make a strong password and avoid a weak one. To support these essential skills, we’re now going to go over some general strategies of how to keep your passwords in order and get the most security possible out of them. How to Manage Your Passwords

Tips for managing your passwords

1. Use some sort of memory trick to remember your passwords.

In the last tip for our How to Make a Strong Password tutorial, we suggested starting with a memorable (but uncommon) phrase, writing down the first letter of each word, and then substituting numbers and symbols based on sounds and shapes. This would result in a strong password that was easier to remember. While it’s probably simpler to work from the ground up like this, you may be able to remember a complex password that you build from the top-down by using the other tips in that article. How to Manage Your Passwords
For example, “gh$nd4B&8xq%” might be remembered by sounding out some of the letters, numbers, or letters that look similar to symbols. You might come out with something like “ghost and four Band-Aid execute”. Okay, that sentence doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but hopefully you get the idea of how you can sound out what a password looks like in order to develop a memory trick.

2. If it’s easiest for you, write your passwords — or better yet, just clues about them — down.

We realize that memory tricks might not be for everyone. The simpler thing to do, if you need help remembering your passwords, might be to write your passwords down. Even if you do use memory tricks, you might want to write those down, too, just so you can remember them.
If you’re going to write your passwords (or memory tricks) down in order to remember them, don’t do so right on your computer or other digital device. If a hacker installs a spyware program or otherwise takes control of your computer, they might be able to find all of your passwords and use them to break into all of your Internet accounts.
Instead, the best idea is to write your passwords down on a physical piece of paper, or in some sort of address book or diary. Make sure that you store your list of passwords in a secure place, where only you know where it is and/or can get at it.
If you’re able to use memory tricks effectively, write them down instead of your actual passwords. That way, if someone else finds your list, they will have to figure out how your memory tricks work in order learn your passwords, instead of having them spelled out in plain view.

3. Don’t use the same password(s) for multiple websites.

“Remembering all of these passwords is hard!” we hear you say. “Can’t I just make things easy on myself by using a few strong passwords that I know off by heart for all of my accounts?”
While you might be able to get away with this, depending on how strong your passwords are, know that you’re generally taking a large (and rather unnecessary) risk by doing so. The reason for this should be obvious: if a hacker manages to break the password on one of your accounts, then they don’t have to do any extra work in order to break into any other of your accounts that share the same password.
It may be tedious and time-consuming, but the best way to make sure that your Internet accounts stay secure is to use a different password for each of them. This ensures that if a hacker breaks into one of your accounts, you will not have made it easy for them to break into any others.

4. Change your passwords occasionally.

Even if you use strong passwords, hackers and malicious programs can pick away at them and try to figure them out over time. Therefore, another good way to keep your passwords secure is to change them occasionally, perhaps every three months or so. This undoes any progress that troublemakers may have made at cracking your passwords, ensuring that you always stay one step ahead of them.

5. If you think an account has been hacked, try resetting its password.

As we noted in our How to Reset Your Password tutorial, resetting your password for one of your Internet accounts is a strategy that you can use if you think that someone knows how to get into that account without your permission. As an added bonus, some websites (such as Facebook) will kick out anyone who happens to be using your account when you reset your password, so you may be able to turn the tables on an intruder.
If you wish to reset the password for an account because you think someone has hacked into it, one suggestion that we’ll make is to do so from someone else’s computer. The reason for this is because if someone hacks one of your accounts, they may have also hacked into your computer (or they may at least be able to access the information necessary to do so). Therefore, if you try to reset your password from your own computer, the hacker may be able to manipulate your computer’s actions in order to block your attempts, or even lock you out of your computer.
A final tip that we’ll give for remembering your passwords and keeping them secure is to use a password manager. We’ll get into what these are and how to use them in the next few tutorials in this course.

How to Manage Your Passwords

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How to Create a Secure Password
Tech Support

How to Create a Secure Password

by Steve Black
written by Steve Black

What is a strong password?

We’ve shown you several different examples of what a weak password looks like. So, then, what does a strong one look like? Well, it would look something like this: How to Create a Secure Password

1Bx8$h&73!P

“Wait a minute!” you might say. “That password looks like total nonsense!” Well, that’s sort of the point: it’s difficult for someone else to guess because it’s not in a pattern that anybody (except maybe you) would recognize. You’ll see that this password follows almost all of the rules for what makes a good password that we’re going to list below. How to Create a Secure Password

What makes a good password?

1. Make sure that your password is of sufficient length.

The first step towards making a more secure password is to increase its length. The more characters that a password has, the more characters a hacker has to guess before they can break it. Most websites will suggest — and some will even require — that your password is at least 8 characters long (our example is 11). However, don’t go overboard and make a password that’s so long that you can’t easily remember it yourself! How to Create a Secure Password

2. Use different types of characters in your password.

Use both letters and numbers in your password. Since there are 10 numbers (from 0 to 9) and 26 letters, a hacker will have to guess from between 36 different possibilities for each character in your password. If you can, also try to use special symbols in your password (e.g. !,@,#,$,%, or &). This can mean that a hacker will have to try between 50 or more different possibilities for each character in your password! How to Create a Secure Password

3. If possible, use both upper-case and lower-case letters.

Many websites allow your account password to be case-sensitive; that is, they care about whether or not a letter in your password is capitalized. If that’s the case (no pun intended), use both capital and non-capital letters in your password. This makes for 26 more possibilities that someone has to try for each character in your password if they want to crack it!

4. Don’t base your password on easily-recognizable patterns.

A common mistake that we pointed out with the bad passwords listed in our Worst Passwords article is that they all follow patterns that are relatively easy to figure out, such as:

  • Simple sequences of numbers
  • Common words or phrases
  • Other physical patterns, such as rows or columns of keys on a keyboard

There are a few different ways to avoid making a password like this:

  • Use more than one type of character (letters, numbers, or symbols).
  • Don’t use too many of one type of character.
  • Don’t use too many of one type of character in a row.

Our example, for instance, contains 4 letters, 4 numbers, and 3 symbols (so fairly equal proportions). Also, the pattern is number-letter-letter-number-symbol-letter-symbol-number-number-symbol-letter. This isn’t an obvious pattern, as opposed to something like all numbers, then all letters, then all symbols; or number-letter-symbol, and repeat that until we run out of characters.

5. Base your password on a memorable (but not overly common) phrase.

To make a strong password that’s easier to remember, start with a sentence or phrase about something. Then, write down the first letter of each word in that sentence, and then substitute in capital letters, numbers, and symbols from there. For example, let’s try this sentence:

  • “I went to Eat at Joe’s for breakfast on Saturday, May 9th.”

If we write down the first letter of each word, we get this:

  • iwteajfbosmn

Not bad; it’s certainly long enough at 12 characters, and it doesn’t appear in any sort of pattern to anyone who doesn’t know the phrase that you based it on. However, it only contains lower-case letters.
Let’s fix that by adding some numbers. Not only is there already a number in the phrase (9), but since the number “2” sounds like the word “to”, and the number “4” sounds like the word “for”, we can substitute those numbers for those words. Now, we have this:

  • iw2eaj4bosm9

Alright, now let’s spice it up by adding some symbols. The symbol “@” stands for the word “at”, so that’s an easy substitution. In addition, if you look closely, the symbol “!” looks like a capital letter “I”, and the “$” symbol looks like a capital letter “S”. Let’s add those in now:

  • !w2e@j4bo$m9

Great, we’re almost there! Now, let’s just add in the capital letters that were already in the sentence, and we get this:

  • !w2E@J4bo$M9

Voila! We now have a password that is sufficiently long, contains all sorts of different characters, and doesn’t follow any sort of pattern except the phrase that you based it on!
Alright! Now that you know some strategies for creating strong passwords (and avoiding creating weak ones), it’s time to put your skills to the test. Our next tutorials will show you how to change or reset a password for one of your computer or Internet accounts, so that you can create a better one.

How to Create a Secure Password

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