No matter how strong a password policy you have, it won’t do any good if people just jot passwords down on paper and stick it to their monitors.   Here are some aspects when it comes to secure passwords:

The Good:

1.Most people don’t fear passwords, they fear remembering passwords.  Many users consider this embarrassing or a failure on their part if it happens.  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.Consider longer passwords.  Use at least six to eight characters.  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 ‘dog’’.  Consider something stronger such as i.e. ‘p22sswo44rd’.

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

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

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

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

1.Write 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.

The reason for this is that these unwanted parasites can hide in areas of the computer that you can’t normally access. The biggest problem with these parasites is that most users don’t know just how highly dangerous they can be. Sure they cause your computer to slow down (a lot), install things you don’t want, and more, but they also do much worse things. Having spyware or adware on your computer compromises your privacy to a exceedingly dangerous level.

How often do you enter sensitive personal information on the internet? For most people, this will be quite often. Many of these parasites will track everywhere that you go on the internet and report it back to it’s creator. It doesn’t stop at that though. Not only will it track everywhere you go, but it will track everything you type and click at these locations as well. What this means is that if you enter sensitive data such as your social security number, credit card number, bank password a bad guy who is probably a thief also has that information.

To make matters even worse, this information is often sold to even more people; this means that hundreds of people, perhaps many more, could have access to your valuable personal information. If you want to keep your privacy on the internet, you’ll need to remove any spyware and adware that inhabits your computer. There is a free report named “Adware Removal” which outlines everything that spyware and adware do, as well as how to get rid of it. Remember, the report is completely free and definitely worth a read if you want to protect your computer.

Click Here To Dowload Your Free Spyware Removal Report Follow this link to learn more about the removal of Spyware and Internet Affiliate Marketing.

I began to wonder if it might be amount that is keeping it from wide spread adoption. After checking on pricing, $59.95 (as of 9/26/08) is a reasonable amount. The only bad thing I found in reviews was its lack of heuristic scanning.

Heuristic scanning: “A heuristic search is used to spot new, unknown viruses in your systems that have not yet been identified. Only some antiviruses can do this type of search, the majority are only able to spot known viruses.” This doesn’t seem to be the reason either.

I will chalk it up to a lack of marketing. The reason I say this is because I see heuristic scan capability incorporated in the latest release. Most importantly, I found out that most customers and potential customers are still looking for their antivirus and firewall as separate offerings.

Bob Metcalfe, the person attributed as the Inventor of the Internet exemplifies what choosing what is not so popular….”And I turned around to look at these 10, 12 AT&T suits, and they were all laughing. And it was in that moment that AT&T became my bte noire, because I realized in that moment that these SOBs were rooting against me. To this day, I still cringe at the mention of AT&T. That’s why my cell phone is a T-Mobile. The rest of my family uses AT&T, but I refuse .”

Granted, choosing PC Tools Internet Security will not be that dramatic but it could prove to be a good internet security application for your computer.