Password problem

[Doug Marks]

Student comment: “I tried coming up with 15 passwords but none are acceptable to your new forum. This is a guitar forum not a national security website. Why is your password requirements so high?”

There is a possibility that your password security standards are too low. You’re right, security for your account on this Forum isn’t a big deal. What’s someone going to do, steal your password and start talking about the perfect Les Paul pickup? I think we could all handle that.

You should get in the habit of choosing secure passwords for all of your accounts. NEVER type a password. Passwords should always be copied and pasted. Why’s that? A hacker can install a key stroke logger on your computer. The key stroke logger makes a record of every keystroke and mails the info to the hacker. So everything you type can be stolen by a key word logger. You probably think that’s not going to happen to you. I always copy and paste passwords to avoid this. My wife didn’t take this precaution and a hacker gained access to our bank account. They knew my wife’s user name and password so they were able to go into our account and see that little .73 deposit that proved they owned our account. They set up there own accounts in Russia and over a two week period drained my bank account of several thousand dollars. Passwords should be taken seriously.

There are bots that troll the Internet. Once they’ve gained access to your user name, and that’s as easy as signing on to our Forum and copying your user name right off of your post. Then the bot can go through the entire dictionary until it finds the correct password. So, any word that can be found in a dictionary is weak. Technically, a bot can’t do that on our Forum because 5 tries and they’re locked out. For that reason we actually do accept somewhat weak passwords.

Here’s an example. A password like “notebook” is in the dictionary… too weak. Our system would probably accept note7book but why not spice it up a bit? Be creative! How about “note9(BOOk” ?

Metal Method Guitar Instructor

[sky blue metal]

Interesting, didn’t know about the copy and paste. Cool. Thanks.

[Author]

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