Protecting Your Passwords
Why are password important?
As well as not wanting someone else to access the work on your computer, legislation obliges us to protect information in accordance to “The Data Protection Act 1998”. Much of our work contains personal information about employees, children and the public. We could therefore be in breach of the Data Protection Act if we do not prevent unauthorised access to our computers by using secure passwords.
Good Practice
Select a password you can remember without writing it down and never leave it written down close to your PC. Never tell anyone your password – unless requested by a member of IBS staff to help you solve a problem.
Creating Secure Passwords
A secure password is one that is difficult to guess and to crack. A password that is made up of alphabetic characters or a common word is very easy to crack. What you need is a password that will be a challenge to the password cracking software to the point that it would take more time than most people would be willing to devote to it than it is worth. A good secure password should consist of no less than 6 characters and include numbers (the more characters the harder they are to crack). If you are very concerned about security you should also consider using a mix of upper and lower case characters and also special character (i.e. $%”& etc), if you do use this method though please remember exactly what you have chosen.
So how do you create a secure password that contains these elements and is fairly easy to remember? This can be more simple than you would first think, though it does take a little thought. One way is to substitute numbers for letters. If you use a word like garden you could modify it by submitting the @ symbol for the “a” and the number 3 for “e”. You could then add some numbers to the beginning or end or both of the word to make it around 8 characters long. Using this method your password could be 9g@rd3n9. This password would be very secure and relatively easy to remember.
