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LEWISTOWN – Nowadays you need a password for just about everything, and people with nefarious goals are becoming more and more creative in how they figure out your passwords.
“Almost everything of ours, banking, email can be found online. We have to protect ourselves,” Juniata County Library Director Vince Giordano said.
Several times a year Giordano holds workshops at the library on various topics, and the most recent one was on password security.
“I have become very enthusiastic about this,” he said.
Giordano said the turnout for the workshop was good and they covered a lot of material.
“Thankfully, most who showed up for the class were retired. They don’t want to be victims,” Giordano said.
Giordano said the class was a great opportunity for people to have a roundtable discussion on password security.
Creating a strong line of defense can be a lot of work at first, but it’s worth it in the long run.
“Create multiple lines of defense; don’t be obvious with your passwords,” Giordano said. “Using the same password on several websites is convenient for us, but also convenient for hackers. Never use the password for ultra-sensitive websites anywhere else.”
Even the most secure passwords are vulnerable to a slew of attack strategies, including brute-forcing – when a hacker or computer program cycles manually through every possible combination of characters – and malware, which covertly gains access to a private computer in order to gather personal data.
“The best security solutions we see these days are ones that layer in several elements, so if one is compromised it doesn’t break the whole system,” Giordano said. “Avoid patterns and remember the basics. Don’t use a single dictionary word, names, dates, or personally identifying info in your password; use a mix of character types, including spaces and make your passwords as long as possible.”
Giordano said if a specific site you are using ask security questions, use irrelevant answers. For example: What town was your grandmother born in? Make something up, because hackers could quite possibly figure out where your grandmother was born. Remember, it’s not that hard to find out personal history on the internet.