It’s still Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so in today’s post I’m passing on a number of security recommendations for online activity, some that the FBI has been promoting for Internet safety. Never forget that any kind of business or work you do online — including email, shopping, social media sites, and surfing – warrants some level of scrutiny. So spend some time during Cybersecurity Awareness Month thinking about what you need to do to make yourself less vulnerable to attack as you use the Internet.

Another diatribe about passwords

Changing passwords and making sure that you don’t use the same password for multiple sites is still very important — in spite of recent warnings that frequent password changes might result in simpler, more guessable passwords. If one of your accounts is compromised, you probably don’t want all of them to suffer the same fate. And the passwords you choose should be complex enough to not be easily guessed. Once you have dozens of passwords, you might elect to use a secure password repository to keep track of them. I’ve been hearing warnings for years about not writing passwords down, but how much of a problem this is depends on where and how you write them down. At one point in my career I kept track of a few lock combinations by disguising them as phone numbers in my address book along with carefully concocted names that reminded me which combination belonged to which lock. Only I could tell the difference between those entries and all the legitimate contact information that filled the book. Because the names made up and weren’t related to people I really knew, they serving as clues. These days a very secure password storage tool serves the same purpose – and can be kept on a USB drive so it’s not even online unless needed and is securely stashed otherwise.

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