Passwords

The need to change our passwords often, means keeping the list up to date.

@ataboy I try to change my Banking one and other important ones periodically. Just had to change one last week, because of a problem.

Not speaking to Jabo, specifically, of course, but how many people do you think EVER change their passwords, @AnneEJ ? I have no numbers but not many at all. And they usually just go back and forth between one or two anyway! But we all know better, everyone can weigh their own options as they like against the perceivable threats!

It could probably save a lot of confusion.

@ataboy That sounds interesting. I know I have a note to give to a person if anything happens to his parents, telling him where to find the key to access information.

A great place for the most important numbers and so forth is sometimes in a magnetic pocket on your refrigerator. It may also reference where any other materials can be located in another room or something like that, for instance!

That is why I keep a list, as I have a lot of different passwords

Right on, @infatuatedbby! And if you do change then relatively often and include upper/lowers/numbers/symbols and TRY not to repeat them....impossible! Then I have to reset my passwords constantly, since I can't remember them. By the way, that's why it's best to use several main emails that are unassociated. If all of your accounts can simply be reset to one email address for many accounts, then there becomes but a single password that one needs to breach. And believe me, the second they are in the password has been changed and they are hitting all the key sites looking for material related to email names/addys! But it's hard to do! Oh and: password computer 12345 1234 123456 1234567890 qwert are ALL terrible passwords, and almost all still on the top ten list, even with many sites forcing strongly written codes! Can you believe that!

@ataboy Oh yes, I try to make my passwords harder than "password, computer, or numbers in sequence"

It could save our family a lot of headaches

It's something to think about, isn't it?

@AnneEJ definitely has to be in a safe place. I don't leave my passwords out in the open

That is a good idea as long as our list is kept in a safe place

If we are changing them frequently, we need to change our list

Glad you agree with me.

Better today than tomorrow, too! It's easier to put off...well for some of us at least (I don't mean to speak for you!)

As long as someone knows them, it should eliminate any problems

Worth looking into

@ataboy Something to think about, thanks for the warning

You're quite welcome, @AnneEJ.

@LadyDuck I hate to say it, but that would only prevent some of the tactics that are used by such people. It's often pretty easy to slip some freshly-coded trojan past most antivirus/antimalware applications and onto the computer. It then deploys a payload that searches for encryption technology signatures that can be accessed from that computer, not from the internet anymore at that stage. If you're ext drive is always connected it will find it pretty quickly usually and toss it back to a covert IP address for storage until the individual retrieves it, anonymously from that OL location. If you do go through the hassle of connecting and disconnecting the drive each time you use it, the hidden scanner will often be designed to wait for new drives to be added, or else just constantly scan in a "dumb" manner, but in either case it can grab a copy of the file at that time, and pretty fast too, since it's not very much data. Then it transmits it back across the net when and as it's designed to do. This is just one of many methods that such a password encrypted archive does still remain vulnerable to under the scenario you are describing. And this type of data are often considered the holy-grail of "scores", since they are often like skeleton keys to a lot of things a hacker desires. Furthermore, the encryption app often offers a sense of more security than they truly provide (as I said before there are some hardware based exceptions to this, but they are usually pretty expensive and generally used only in business. I do apologize if I come across as argumentative or anything like that, I assure you I don't mean to. I just feel it wouldn't be right to not tell you that it's still less safe than you (and most intelligent people) might believe it to be.

It is easy to see how it could be a problem