World Password Day

Life is not about how much you can pack into your days, but about the impact you can make with your days. ~Valorie Burton


The first Thursday of May has been designated as World Password Day by the Registrar of National Day Calendar.  It’s a day to promote better password habits.  Interestingly, the National Day Calendar has a list of 1500  World Day Celebrations.  You can search for your favorite day here: https://nationaldaycalendar.com.  In case you’re curious, chocolate has two days, January 31st is Hot Chocolate Day and August 4th is Chocolate Chip Cookie Day!  (Because Chocolate addicts want to know!)

Meanwhile, back at https://www.passwordday.org, there is a great information about protecting your password and your identity.  Did you know identity theft is one of the world’s fastest growing crimes?  Adding strong authentication to your password can prevent it.  Passwordday.org has some pretty impressive tools to walk you through the process of adding layers of protection to your password.  For starters, use a strong password. It should be a minimum of 8 characters. Use a combination of UPPER case, lower case, numbers and symbols.  Never use the same password twice.  Need help keeping track of all those unique passwords?  I use dashlane, available at dashlane.com.  Lastpass at lastpass.com is also highly rated.

When possible, use Multifactor Authentication.  This will send a code to your smart phone, or require a code generated by an app on your smart phone.  Supply the correct code and you are allowed onto the site.  I have several accounts that send codes to my phone. It adds 30-60 seconds to the login time, but that is well worth the peace of mind!

Fingerprint ID can be an option.  This is available on most smart phones and many laptops.  

Want to know which sites support Multifactor Authentication and how to turn it on?  https://www.telesign.com/turnon2fa/tutorials is an impressive list of popular sites with step-by-step directions for achieving said goal.

Curious about what cyber criminals know about your organization?  Which of your email addresses and identities are exposed on the internet? Criminals use this information to launch social engineering, spear phishing and ransomware attacks against you.

There is a complimentary Email Exposure Check which will identify at-risk users. It only takes a few minutes and can be an eye-opening discovery. It is available at: https://info.knowbe4.com/email-exposure-check-pro-chn

That’s it for this month.  Until Next Month, remember to Keep Your Data Safe!

Janet

 

Because it made me laugh!named wifi: hack if you can