Time to talk about that thing you all hear about:  your passwords!  How many times have you heard that you should be changing your passwords regularly?   How about choosing a password that is strong vs. weak?  Choose a place to record them so you won’t forget.  Don’t whine about how many passwords you need to know.  We offer a free program to do just this.  It’s Whisper which you will find under Downloads on our site.

It should go without saying that your password is one of the really important safeguards of your bank account, your email account, your network, etc.  Using something that is easy to remember usually ends up as your name, the word “password,” the numbers “123456” or something equally clever (NOT!)

In general, your password should be 8 or more characters in length.  It’s good to include uppercase as well as lowercase letters.  Adding a number or another character (such as the # or ! or @) makes it even stronger.  Of course, using a password written in a foreign language helps, too.  When trying to hack into accounts, the bad guys frequently launch a “dictionary attack” which just means they try every conceivable word in the dictionary.  This doesn’t take as much time as you may think. They have computers to help them!