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Project managers and engineers at technology management and computer services firms commonly wage a “battle of password policy” with the users and administration of the clients we serve.   Information engineers must ensure the confidentiality and security of the technology infrastructure,  which starts at the end user computer with a password.  Most companies have a password policy, sometime dictated by a compliancy standard, other times an adopted standard with loose terms. But for the most part requiring passwords on anything that needs to be access controlled is step one.

Despite the nonsense of it, employees jotting down a password on a sticky note and attaching it to a monitor happens all the time.   Here are some aspects when it comes to secure passwords:

The Good:

1.People don’t fear passwords themselves, they fear remembering passwords.  Many users consider this embarrassing or a failure on their part if it happens.  As strong as this fear is, never write a password down.

2.Good passwords have uppercase and lowercase letters.  They also can contain numbers, spaces or even special characters such as &%$#.  With this in mind, try taking a password you can remember and converting it a bit to make it a bit more complex.  Example: (current password) matilda – (new password) M@tild@  or M@T1lda.  This increases the security of the password exponentially.

3.Length of the password is also important.  Six to eight characters is a decent size password when combined with these other methods.  M@tild@ would be good, but L0vEM@tild@ is much better!

The Bad:

1.Do not use plain English words by themselves (anything in a dictionary), such as ‘the, password, cat’.  Consider something stronger such as i.e. ‘p22sswo44rd’.

2.Do not use easily retrievable information by itself, such as your birthday, date of hire, child’s, phone number…etc.

3.Do not make the password too short i.e. ‘bob’

4.Lastly do not use the same password for every system or login.

If you absolutely need assistance in remembering a password and must write something down, then do the following.

1.Jot a sentence on a post-it note.  For example purposes we will use “My daughter is two years old.”

2.Now (mentally) take the second letter of each sentence: “yaswel”

3.Lastly, take your birth date, add it to the end: “yaswel22”

4.Use capitalize to strengthen further: “Yaswel22”

Using this example, all you have to remember is to use the second letter of each word and your birth date and not some obscure random password.

Finally, there are many choices for password management software nowadays which are much more reliable and secure than an excel spreadsheet or writing them all down on notepad paper.

Safe Internet Blog computer services, corporate it, internet security, online security, password policy

If you’re familiar with MS-DOS at all, you’ll recall that it’s a command-driven operating system that performs functions issued at the C:> prompt. The only way to get an MS-DOS computer to do something was to type a command at this prompt and if you can imagine, it was a rather cumbersome way to use a computer.

As an example, to load up Microsoft's simple editing program, you had to type the name of the drive that the program was on, the directory that the program was in, and then the name of the program. So if Microsoft Edit was in a directory or folder named “Process,” you could start the program by typing, “C:>processedit.com" Then, and only then would the program load up for use.

This is a small command, but just imagine if you had a program that was deeply nested within a series of folder. You could end up typing a command as wide as your computer screen or worse, long enough that the entire command would have to wrap onto the next line! Now imagine having to type these long commands every time that you wanted to start a program. Yikes!

That's one of the reasons why batch files became so popular. Batch files are small text-based documents that contain a bunch of these commands on their own lines. When executed, they would process each command without the user having to type each and every one of them.

When Windows was developed, the need for typing commands was essentially eradicated thanks to the introduction of the point-and-click (mouse) interface. But this didn’t stop the batch file fever that started under MS-DOS – and in some small circles, batch files are still as popular as they were in the beginning.

About Author: Haiming Jiang is the Managing Director of A+ Computer Support – a company that has been providing excellent computer services in Auckland, New Zealand for over 5 years.

Safe Internet Blog computer administrator, computer repair, computer services, computer support, IT support., network engineer, network support