Digital Nomads

Password security is important for everyone, whether you live in a home or on the road. However, when you are out and about for long periods of time, it is extremely important. We are told to use unique, complex passwords and they can be very hard to remember, so we quite often find ourselves using more memory-friendly ones, which can lead us into trouble. Quite often, travellers are using their mobile devices rather than a home computer (where I’m sure many have saved their passwords in the browser) so they tend to have their passwords on hand, one way or another.

I love this short video on YouTube from Stevie Martin, as it demonstrates the frustration most of us suffer trying to come up with unique, secure passwords.

Whether a traveller or not, if you answer YES to any of the below questions, you NEED to read this blog:

• Are your passwords written in a book, printed on a piece of paper and stored in your van (or home)?
• Do you store your passwords on your phone in the contacts list, in a note or in a document stored on your phone?
• Do you use the same password for multiple accounts?
• Does any of your passwords contain any of the following:
  • Date of Birth (any combination)
  • Your name or part of it
  • Your partner, children, or pets name?
  • Single words

How did you go? Did you answer yes to ANY of these? Read on and I’ll give you some tips for helping to keep yourself, your family, your identity and your money more secure.

Passphrases

Use a passphrase. The longer the password is, the more difficult it is to crack. So pick a group of four random words that you will remember.

As you can see in this cartoon from xkcd.com, words that we try to make complex by substituting symbols and numbers for letters can be extremely hard to remember and can be very easy to guess. I used this site to test out some passwords and the results are very interesting (note that these are not my passwords).

Soccer839

I used the word soccer because I like playing it and I used 3 random numbers. Because I am making it tricky if anyone knows that I like playing soccer. Right? Well, this would only take 3 days to crack.

S0cc3r389

I tried to be even smarter here substituting some of the letters with numbers. Guess how long? Yep 3 days. The computers that brute force attack passwords, have already entered these substitutes so you aren’t making it any harder for them.

S@cc3r389!

Now let’s get even trickier. Let’s add in some symbols! This one would actually take about 5 years to crack, but am I going to remember it? Nope!

PaintGlassFairyRoof

Now let’s take 4 seemingly random words and see what happens. Now, this looks like 4 random words strung together. But what if I knew that I needed to Paint my Glass Fairy that lives on the Roof? That is something that is meaningful to me and I am more likely to remember it. Take a guess at how long these 4 simple words would take to crack…… Years? Decades? Try 3 hundred trillion years.

Sentences

Now I don’t mean using known sentences, but maybe you could have a sentence in your head and you could use the first letter of each word.

Mcirah6c

Take this one for example. My car is red and has 6 cylinders

While the idea behind this one seems great, the fact that it only has 8 characters is a problem. It would only take 1 hour to hack that one.

Mcirah6cbiwth8

My car is red and has 6 cylinders but I want to have 8

Now this one would take 9 million years. Add an exclamation mark at the end (cos you really want 8 cylinders!) and you’ve taken it to 15 billion years.

Unique

If a hacker gets into one account and you use the same password for other accounts, it makes it extremely easy for them to start accessing several accounts and services really quickly. Your email account is the most important. How do you reset a password? You click “Forgot Password” and it sends a link to your email. This means if someone gets hold of that password, they can change all your other passwords.

So now I am going to be a real pain and say that all your passwords should be unique and at this point, you are probably going to scream at me, because how are you supposed to remember something like PaintGlassFairyRoof and Mcirah6cbiwth8 and hundreds of other passwords? Yeah, I get it so go and read my blog on Password Managers. I am also going to address the very important topic of Multi-Factor authentication, so stay tuned. We don’t want to overwhelm you too much.