ALTERAtions Blog

A great post recently popped up outlining how a hacker can get your password. You can read the interesting details here:

One Man’s Blog

After my Dad died, we found that he had password protected his Microsoft Money file. Fortunately for us he used a really bad password and after downloading a free cracker utility from the web, we cracked the password in 3 seconds (he used “bucks”). I tried this method below and gave up after 3 continuous days as the password still was not cracked.

As a real estate professional you’re responsible for a lot of sensitive client data as well as personal data. For those of you who’s passwords are based on your kid’s name, pet’s name, birthday etc. I’ve got an easy 3-step solution to have a different password for every site and NEVER forget it.

1. Simply start with a base word – in this example I’ll use our dog’s name “Bashor.”
2. Change one letter (at least) to a number like 0 (zero) for “o” or 3 for “E” or 5 for “s.” In this example I’ll change the “s” to a 5 – Ba5hor – Great now I have a base word that is extremely hard to crack since it contains upper & lowercase letters and numbers. Remember, the more characters the better. But we need a unique password for each site.
3. Pick a consistent character or characters from the name of the website and append it to your base password. In this example I’m going to pick the first and last character of my banking site wellsfargo.com. I’ll take the “w” and the “o” and append it to the beginning of may base – woBa5hor. So my passwords begin to look like this:
   www.countrywide.com: ceBa5hor
   www.united.com: udBa5hor
   www.schwab.com: sbBa5hor

This gives you a different password for each site that you’ll always remember and is really, really hard to crack (just remember to tell your loved ones about it).