The www - the
Wild
West
Web or the "internet" can both be a boom or a bust and can be a frightful place. There is so much that we do everyday on the WWW from work, financial transactions, emails, etc. that a breach of security could be downright spooky.
Thus, I strongly encourage you to add to your New Years resolution list to review, update, and change all of your security settings and passwords starting at your router and continuing through all of your software applications and internet pages, mobile phones, etc.
I have adopted a three tier level of security for myself based on the importance of what I am protecting from prying eyes.
Level-1 - Secret - this is "common" webpages that hold little or no personal information regarding myself and certainly no financial information. Examples of this security would be webpages that require you to logon to read information or leave a comment. Password lengths for this should be at least eight characters.
Level-2 Top Secret - this would be webpages that contain some sensitive information but no financial information. Password lengths for this should be at least fifteen characters. This would include retail sites that store your credit card information.
Level-3 Beyond Top Secret - this is information that is of the highest order of security. Password lengths would be on the order of 20-30 characters in length. This would be banking transactions, medical records, etc. These are websites that under no circumstances do you ever want a breach.
Ok, so how in the world do you remember a password that is of these huge lengths? EASY! Take your favorite song, nursery rhyme, spiritual verse, poem, etc. and use the first letter of each word as part of the password.
Example:
Nursery Rhyme Buckingham Palace by AA Milne
They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace -
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
Alice is marrying one of the guard.
"A soldier's life is terrible hard,"
Says Alice.
So, with this example your password would be easy to remember as you recite it as you type it in - TCGABPCRWDWAAIMOOTGASLISHSA
Now, to make it just a wee bit longer and a lot more difficult for someone to break with a computer program, add some meaningful numbers and special characters to it.
TCGABPCRWDWAAIMOOTGASLISHSA(1970*04*01)
Be sure that your routers are NOT set to the default password. Change it to a Level-3 security level. Make sure that you have passwords on your mobile phones - at the SIM and bootup level. The more security you have the better.
On your banking and financial institutions security, the ones that I am familiar with allow you to have extra security and this can be applied to your home/office computer - something along the lines of security used if you should be using a "public computer". I have as many security questions invoked as they will allow and I even have to answer the questions regardless of where I am located - home/office/public. I never want anyone to have the unauthorized ability to get into any financial systems of mine. Paranoid - darn right - and there is a good reason for it and you should be paranoid too.
One other resolution for you - how often do you backup all of your data on your home computers? When I was at Texas Foundries Citation Lufkin we had fire drills on a regular basis. We also had two large bank vaults on the premises for storing files and computer data. After one fire drill I called a meeting with all of the front office and pointed out that "everything was lost" and that we were starting over. Everything on their desk was gone and everything on the backup computer disks got "burned up" in the fire. I made my point. During a fire drill, the safes and vaults needed to be closed on the way out. We also started off-site DRA - Disaster Recovery Area at that time by taking disks, tapes, and drives of backed up data off-site.
I personally use one of the new internet services that automagically backs up my data everynight to some remote server. The cost is relatively inexpensive and the peace of mind is outstanding. All of the pictures that I have scanned in plus the Brazillians of digital images and all of my financial and tax records are safely stored. If I lost all of this stuff, I would just sit down and cry.
So, take heart and take action on these important New Years resolutions...
Until next time, see you on down the road...
