Some tips on keeping passwords protected

Longer ones are best, and shun phone numbers

BY DAVE SCOTT
Beacon Journal business writer

Humbly, I stand before you, scorned by the experts as practitioner of dangerous and foolish behavior.

My crime? Sloppy use of online passwords.

My penalty? More spam than any man should ever be forced to eat. Please, don't tell my doctor.

Even before I was writing about online issues, I was out there surfing the net and leaving traces of my bad behavior everywhere I went.

I signed up for chat rooms, news sites, games, raffles . . . all kinds of stuff, including a lot of places I can't remember anymore.

My faulty memory has a lot to do with this. I have trouble remembering passwords. I found that I would go back to a newspaper site and forget my password, or even the name I used to sign up. Frustrated, I decided to use the same password everywhere I went.

It was the name of a 1960s boxer I used to follow back when I was too young to know better. This solved my memory problem, but brings a scolding from the security folks who say that's just the sort of mistake that brings major problems on the Web.

Here are some of the rules for safe passwords:

• If you get a temporary password, change it right away and then periodically after that.
• Don't use names that are familiar to you; they are easy to guess.
• Never use telephone numbers as passwords. Don't use a series of numbers like 1111 or sequential numbers like 3456.
• Longer passwords are better than short.

Of course, passwords also are used for automated tellers, phone mail and other devices and this advice, provided by Dave Onak of Ameritech, works in almost every case.

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