Welcome everyone to our new page and our first blog posting!  

Of all the motion and commotion happening in our world; we thought the best place to start is back to the basics.  

Your first line of defense, and the border we help defend; Password Protection.  

If any of you are like me, then you find it exhausting remembering a bunch of passwords. I got so tired of it that at one point I only had two, maybe three main passwords that I would alter depending on the requirements of the pages credential limitations.  

It wasn’t long working with the guys here and listening to some of the “battle stories” of breaches past, that I started taking my password protection seriously. I got frustrated; how can I possibly create, update, and memorize unique passwords to all my accounts!?! It is said that most people average as high as 80 passwords. Ugh!  

It’s really not so bad though. And here are some great tips that helped me get back up to speed protecting myself and doing my part to protect our company and customers. By learning a few simple skills, you could easily boost your company’s data security.  

We all understand the concept and principal behind having a strong password, but like my diets, they are cumbersome, difficult to work around, and always have to be changed because they get old or don’t work anymore. When considering password quality think length, mixed characters, and phrases, the more characters the more difficult the password is. The goal is to have length, be unique, rememberable, yet difficult to guess. While weak passwords are short or common words such as “Password” (which surprisingly is the most commonly used password in some variation) that can be easily guessed or identifiable by someone who knows you well, such as a coworker.  

Okay, so we all know this much. Now let’s go over some tips to really start securing your password protected data.  

Five easy steps to boost your password protection practices: 

1. Have fun and be creative but not specifically to you, or those close to you would easily recognize 

1. For example, let’s say you were logging into your work email and that password was EmailPassword1! Well, it is longer but not really the goal here is it? 

2. Instead be a little more… “off the wall” perhaps something like PW4wrk-EM (password for work-email). 

1. See?! Not so bad right? That is 9 characters, one number, one special character and no known or common phrases.  

2. Play with your Keyboard 

1. Use the keys to wright your first or last initial. 

1. Just be sure to incorporate the number and special character row.  

2. Or think about this; have you ever been composing something and while you were thinking, you lightly strummed your keyboard, or your desk in some pattern while listening to music? Well, with your eight digits on the eight keys (asdf;lkj), and adding just one number 0-9; there are a total of 134,217,728 possible password combinations just by strumming your fingers to your favorite tune in a different pattern.   

3. Use commonly allowed symbols as emoticons “:)”  

1. Super easy to remember and very uncommon in passwords.  

4. Do not reuse your passwords.  

5. Use a Password Manager.  

1. Google has a built in password manager to help organize and remember all of your passwords, and it will even auto-fill all of your online forms including your Usernames and Passwords; and guess what, it is all FREE!!  

1. But wait, think about this; the only thing keeping someone from all of those passwords and that personal form information (including google saved credit cards) is the login password to your computer. How often have you walked away from your desk and left your station unlocked?  

GJ Computer Center’s cyber security partners offer some of the best penetration software platforms out there. They also have in their huge arsenal of cyber warfare a great password manager which, yes can even help you create quality passwords.  Give us a call to talk about how easy it is to begin protecting your business, your employees, and your customer’s data, and documents.  

C?UcanCRE8Pwords2;-) 

(See? You can create passwords too)  

Well that is it everyone, I hope that you enjoyed our first post! Please let us know if there is something you would like us to speak about, or how you like the article. Additional information and sharing your experiences is ALWAYS welcome. Take care everyone and thanks for reading!