COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LOUISIANA Computer Pro – Password Security

As someone providing COMPUTER SUPPORT GONZALES, LOUISIANA, I commonly find that people are using insecure, easily-guessed passwords. The most frequent explanation is that the password is “easy to remember.”

The trouble, of course, is that passwords which are easy to remember are also easy to guess. But when you institute a series of rules and requirements for secure passwords, what usually happens is that people write the password on a sticky note and hang it on the side of their monitor.

As someone providing COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LOUISIANA, I am keenly aware that security and convenience are constantly at war with one another. On the one hand, you’d like to have your business 100% secure… and on the other, you’d like things to be as easy as possible in your business. But secure and easy almost never come in the same package, so every business makes constant trades between one and the other.

The ideal password, of course, looks like random noise. Something along the lines of K!h8j^)Qv,$g is near impossible to guess, but also near impossible to remember. Enforcing passwords like this is almost an invitation to write them down somewhere easy to see.

A more realistic sort of password starts from a word people can remember. Using a common word, of course, is easy to guess – and susceptible to what’s called a “dictionary attack” in security circles, where a would-be attacker simply tries every word in the dictionary until one works.

However, one thing I’ve learned providing IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES is that memorable passwords can be a good thing. Combining two words with a number or special character between them is frequently both memorable and reasonably secure. So while “giraffe” would be a bad password – as would “giraffe1” or “1giraffe” – it’s far more secure to use “giraffe42zebra” instead.

For further security, one or more capital letters can be mixed into the password, but they should usually be placed in the middle of the word rather than the beginning. While it may seem more natural to use “Giraffe42Zebra” as your password, security is significantly higher with “girAffe42zebrA” instead – which can easily be remembered as having capital A’s.

When even greater security is desired, adding “special” characters or punctuation to the password can make the password much more difficult to guess. They can be inserted into the middle of the password, essentially at will – e.g. “gir!Affe4*2zeb&rA” – or used to replace letters which look similar, such as “g!rAffe42zebrA” (replacing the I with !). A similar approach can be used with numbers, such as by replacing the letter E with the number 3 to produce “g!rAff342z3brA” and a highly secure password.

Keep in mind that while it may seem tempting to create an office-wide policy of using animal names or some other category of words, that category may not be particularly memorable (or well-known) to all of your employees. Simply providing these basic guidelines and letting them choose whatever words they prefer will accomplish the real goal: secure passwords which are still memorable.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES. If you need IT SUPPORT for your small business, please contact us at GONZALES COMPUTER CONSULTANT

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