Personal Safety in the 21st Century – Computer Usage and Passwords

So there you are walking down the road chatting away on your mobile phone (maybe it’s an expensive one) and in your bag you have a laptop computer and in your pocket your wallet is full of cash and credit cards 4k Video Downloader Crack Full Download. As you walk along the road you see coming towards you a couple of decidedly ‘dodgy’ looking individuals, you hold on tight to your phone and bag and give a big sigh of relief as the two ‘gentlemen’ walk past you without even noticing that you were there…

You get home, you now feel relaxed and safe and you decide to sit at your computer and ‘chill’ by reading the sports news. You start surfing the net and see that you can download some desktop wallpaper with photos of your favourite team’s players and you also download a compilation video of game highlights… The evening is going well and just before going to prepare your dinner, you decide to check your bank account…

You log on to the bank’s secure website, log into your account and are shocked and dismayed to see that your account is showing a NIL balance and that earlier today there was a withdrawal from the account of over 12, 000!!!

OK, let’s back up for a moment and start by saying that statistically the chance of any specific individual being robbed in this way is pretty slim. Yes it happens, yes it happens a lot – but there is no reason why ‘YOU’ should be targeted… Or is there???

As a very minimum, invest in a good anti-virus suite of programs from one of the bigger suppliers (Kaspersky, Symantec Norton, McAfee, Panda, Trend, etc. ) and practice safe surfing – that means only download files from websites that you trust. Unsolicited files can contain Trojans and other forms of malware – programs that can harm your computer and open it up to prying eyes…

Another important computer safety rule is to have secure and different passwords for all your logins. I use a two tier system, tier one is for not very important sites and each password is made up from three items, a number that is memorable (I suggest that you make this between three and five numbers long) a word that is memorable say for example your father’s middle name. The word should be memorable to you but not too easy for a third party to guess and finally an ID for each website – maybe the first six letters of the website address. Now your secure and unique (more or less) but easy to get at password is those three items in whatever order you prefer. The order stays the same and the only bit that changes is the six letters of the website address.

The second tier password is the one that I use for important sites (typically ones that require a user name as well as a password). I use a random user name and a random password which is generated from upper and lower case letters, numbers and random characters such as ‘$’ and ‘#’ and ‘^’ etc… I change the password length but try and have a minimum of nine characters so that any ‘brute-force’ crack of the password will take a fairly long time.

Now, you may have a lot of Internet sites that you log on to and that might give you a lot of different user names and passwords. So how on earth can you keep track of them? The answer is that luckily moist computers nowadays have HUGH amounts of storage space and most hard disks contain thousands if not tens of thousands of files… This means that someone searching through your computer for important files may have quite a task.

Open up a simple word processor and create a file called ‘Auntie Jane’ or something equally innocuous. In that file you can save your User Names – So your account at the Allied Bakers Bank where your user name is ‘FrEd221’ looks like… ‘ABB FrEd221’ Even if someone sees that item, it does not immediately tell them what the account is for. Then go to a completely different program, it could be anything that allows text to be typed in – indeed it could even be a graphics program as you could store ‘text’ in a graphics file. Here you create another file ‘Bamboo 001’ and in this file you keep the account ref ‘ABB’ along with the password ‘b^hG24*ag32%fERw’. So you have all your login information available at any time but not obviously so. If you have a program that holds text inside of itself like a contact manager you could put your passwords in there so that even if someone had access to your computer and looked for recently opened files, they would not find both files.

Now let’s be completely honest here and state that if your computer is seized by the police or by someone who has a lot of time to sit and analyse your systems and data then Nothing is totally secure. However, if you (like me) are just an ‘average Joe’ then the above system is probably suitable for your needs.