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My Password Safety Technique – What’s Yours?

Online Safety and Passwords - Take It Seriously

Is the beginning of the year a good time to change your passwords? Seems as good as any!

This advice is for everyone. Parents, you definitely want your children to know this, too, for obvious reasons.

Let me try to convince you that you want to have different passwords on different services: If you use the same one on everything, all someone needs to do is get your email and password and they can get into everything. It would be like having your front door key open your bank vault, car, and every other lock you own. That's not good. 

Passwords on a keyboard
Staying safe is important

So I developed a plan to be sure that all the keys are similar enough for me to remember, but different enough so someone can't take that key around and get into all my services. 

Here's my password “plan” to avoid using the same password on different URLs and hopefully prevent me from having to change ALL of my passwords at one time if there's a hack in one of my online profiles, etc.

I use a basic password that I customize for each URL. Then, I take the URL I'm logging into and pull two letters from it, capitalize them, and then add a weird symbol.

For LinkedIn, where my basic password is “pasword24” I would use something like: pasword24LI!

It's something I can remember and has lowercase, uppercase, numbers and a weird symbol. That way, all the passwords are similar and unique (to the point of a 2 letter ID that may be similar on different sites, like LinkedIn.com and Life.com (both start with LI).

You may want to use something that isn't a word or have duplicate or concurrent numbers or letters (which is why I deleted the second ‘s' and didn't use 21). I've been hit with that before and nothing's worse then having to change a special password once you've started working like this.

Do you have a password technique? How do you manage having dozens of logins? Share below!