We conducted a survey and asked a question to internet bees What do you do for protecting online security and password strength?
We get following good responses:
I use a different password for every account, with numbers, upper-and-lower case letters, and symbols. It doesn’t matter. I lost my first hard drive to hackers in the early 90’s, along with my website information, content, affiliate accounts everything. Now, it’s not just hackers. Malicious activity is more widespread than hacking these days. We have entire cultures online who feel justified in taking food out of the mouths of someone else’s family, who feel justified in damaging reputations, and who simply don’t understand that theft is wrong. I’m unlikely to ever recover what was stolen or compromised as a result, but frankly, I don’t have much left to lose at this point. Prepaid cards for one-time purchases help a little, but online security is exhausting. (Victoria Ritterbush)
I use a program called “Roboform” which will generate any strength password you wish, using special characters, numbers and letters. I use the maximum length accepted by the site I am on, then it remembers your log-in and password and keeps it encrypted. I back the file to a flash drive and the network drives, plus print it out occassionally on hard copy to put in the safe. For on-line security I use Norton Internet Security and keep it updated. Never been hacked or gotten a virus. (Steve Gladfelter)
I have a stock VERY un-guessable string, and then I modify/customize it (in ways I’m not saying!) based on the website. If one site is compromised, and my password is discovered by someone, that would help but not “solve” my password anywhere else. Also I use PayPal wherever possible (and change THAT password now and then). I limit my credit card to a very few, like L.L.Bean, that fully realize how catastrophic a break-in would be, for them. (Steve Duerksen)
I use a simple password on my email account, and for every other account I use a 34 character combination of ASCII, UTF-8, different language character sets (Cyrillic, Kanji), and punctuation. And then I use the “forgot my password” option on those accounts to mail a reset back to my email account. ( Douglas Taylor )
Living requires assuming risks, and the smart consumer works to understand them before accepting. There are some things I don’t do online. The safest experience I’ve had was with a VPN requiring an RSA token & password for logon. For passwords I follow industrial security guidelines and use upper & lower case alpha, numeric and special characters (when sites allow them), and 10 to 30 characters long. After I learned about DNS hijacking I realized the usefulness of sign-on-seals. (Rick Keaton)
Regardless of the method of generation, I have a 3 page Excel spreadsheet with passwords for every site I have ever signed up for. It is downloaded on to a flash (USB) drive, and I empty my cache and download folder every time I have to review it. There is no rhyme or reason for why I use a type of User ID or one “style” of PW over another. It is a potpourri of letters/numbers/upper-lower case and not in any order, and do NOT include children’s-pet’s-or-family names, numbers or places of relevance. (Robin Messer)