Mike Benson’s Blog

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit but my online id’s were compromised. Those of you who know me, know I am a bit paranoid about security. My machine at home sits behind a hardware firewall, I run the Microsoft “firewall”, Norton Internet Protection Suite and Lavasoft Adaware.

I have 4 main email accounts, Yahoo, Hotmail, my personal address and Gmail. I was sitting here working and suddenly my Outlook popped up a window that it could not log into my yahoo email. I went to the site and could not log in, I was told I was using an invalid password. I thought maybe yahoo was down, it does happen but not very often. I waited about 20 minutes and still could not log in.

I decided to call a friend and see if his yahoo was down. He was not having any problems. Well, I tried to reset my password and learned that with Yahoo you have to remember the information you used at sign-up. This account is ten or more years old and I generally do not give real personal information. After a phone-call to yahoo though I was able to get it reset.

About thirty minutes later, my outlook popped up a warning that it could not connect to my Hotmail account. Guess what, the same thing happened. I reset that password as well. I decided to pre-empt my other accounts and changed their passwords. Obviously, someone had my email addresses. I used the same password for all my email accounts, I know it’s a bad idea but its easier. The old password was not real strong either.

My new password is much longer, has upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. Its much tougher to type but is much more secure. A long time ago I had a professor that was teaching IT security tell me the best way to create a password so I am going to share that with you.

Everyone has multiple books at their desk right? Pick a book, open to a random page and pick a paragraph. Use the first letter of each word in the first sentence, make sure it is more than ten words long. Now substitute some of the letters with special characters, use the number 1 for L or I and the number 0 for O the $ for s etc… Using the page number from the page use the number in the ones place to tell you which letter to upper case. So, if you are page 153 then every third letter is upper case if its a 155 every fifth letter. If the page number ends in a 1 or 0 use the tens place digit.

Now all you have to do is remember which book and page number your password is on and you can look it up. You will also find this password is actually very easy to remember because it is a sentence. My kids (8 & 10) are required to use this method for their passwords on their computers (I told you I am paranoid). I can hear them when they log in…. “My father was also a scientist he was not one of the good guys”. That was my sons password a couple of months ago.

I am still perplexed, very few people know all of my online identities. Why would someone want to compromise Yahoo or Hotmail… They can get them for free anytime. Here is an interesting experiment though, go to Google and Search for your email, use the Web Search and the group search. I found that one of my accounts has been used to post spam to the newsgroups.

Have fun and be safe

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.