Up Your Password Game

Let's pretend that the majority of people you know are in some way accessible on social media and for the sake of this post let's pretend they post about their lives. Some of the most regularly used security questions for password reminders are as follows:

• "Where did you meet your spouse?"
• "What school did you attend in __ grade?"
• "In what city were you born?"
• "What is your oldest sibling’s birthday month and year?"
• "What was your first pets name?"
• "Who was your childhood best friend?"

Now, how many of those answers do you think could readily be found on a person's Facebook? People like to get worked up when they feel their privacy is being encroached upon but they never stop to think about how much more information that they themselves make available in the first place. Let's say that there are people that exist whom have an excessive amount of free time at their disposal that they spend on the internet. Hypothetically, of course, these people could use information from your Facebook to gain access to change your Facebook password. How much more personal information would they be able to acquire from your privacy settings, private messages or from pretending to be you and messaging friends from your account? Maybe you're smarter than that and a person wouldn't be able to get your password through those means, they could always go the password cracker route. The best advice I could give someone is to:

1. Answer a security question in only a way you would know, example: "In what city did you meet your spouse?" Answered with "Neil Degrasse Tyson". Clearly that isn't the answer to the question, but the only thing that matters is that is is an answer that you will remember.
2. Make a secure password. This should be a no-brainer but a lot of the time I am fixing a person's computer they utilize a very basic password. Do not use words followed by numbers or vice versa and for the love of god do not use a single password for everything. Lets say you use 'password1234', you could make a couple of changes to make that a lot harder to crack. First lets capitalize a letter making it 'passWord1234', then we could rearrange the number placement to '12pass34Word', we could also add a space before so it would be ' 12pass34Word' and finally you could make this universal revolving password by changing it to ' 12pass34Wole' for Google or ' 12pass34Woer' for Twitter. Here is a security check of the example password.

Now you may run into a couple of sites that do not allow for a space in the password but even without it you should be able to remember your password formula. You may not use your computer for more than Instagram but you need to understand that there are plenty of people that do, some of which want your information and could use that information as a stepping stone towards stealing your identity. It takes no time at all to create a new e-mail account, I would recommend having a separate e-mail address for your personal use and for social media. Beyond changing your security questions, password and using a different e-mail address you could always not use your name on social media, tomorrow we will delve a little deeper as to why.