Boulder City Magazine is a monthly publication full of information about Boulder City and Southern Nevada. Boulder City Magazine features the Boulder City Home Guide, a real estate guide to Boulder City and Southern Nevada.

Tech Tip
by Brad Appleby
Appleby Arts

Passwords

The word on passwords is: Don’t use the same password for everything; use a different password for every site. Make your passwords strong by putting numbers, caps and special characters in them when you can. Don’t use “admin” as a user name and password; it’s too easy to hack.


And if you think you are tricky and think no one would ever hide their passwords in these locations, think again: Under the keyboard, under the phone, under the mouse pad, in your top drawer, under your desk and under your chair. The number one location people hide their passwords is on a post it note on their computer monitor. The next level of passwords created by people are words you can see from your computer desk. Passwords like: Dell, Viewsonic, Logitech, Samsung and Sony, just to name a few. Then there are the fun ones containing the names of stuffed animals and things around the desk. People make up passwords with these items, such as browndog, greenfrog and graycat, and then upgrade those passwords with words such as dogfrog, frogcat, catdog and frogdog. 

What should you do? Well, I don’t like online password managers because just like LastPass.com, although it is free, they just got hacked so all your passwords would have had to be changed again. I would keep a word doc file on your computer that is password protected with a list of all your passwords. If you want them online, then create a Google gmail account and save your file online there. Google has an online word processor program that you can access anywhere and you can save your passwords there.

A word of warning about illegal accessing of passwords at internet cafes: Some internet cafes use a screen capture software to copy everything that occurred on the rented computer. That means they would have a copy of all of the passwords you used while on the rented computer. You should use your own laptop or iPad to view your files, and just use their Wi-Fi or internet but not their computer if viewing a password file.

Merry Christmas! I hope you all get new computers for Christmas and set your New Year’s goal to back up your computers. Contact Brad at www.applebyarts.com or call (702) 294-1392.




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