1.2 How to keep evil-doers at bay

First and foremost, make sure you know which web site you are interacting with when you supply credentials. Do not blindly click an email that looks like one from Pay Pal or your bank. Go to your financial institutions via a bookmark or a well-established link.

Next, use different passwords at different web sites. Unless you restrict yourself to very few web sites, this means you must manage them somehow. Pieces of paper get lost. Password list files can wind up getting compromised. If that happens, your entire online world is now open. Encrypted password list files can get decrypted, yielding the same possibility.

Do not use either words or common transformations of words for passwords. Such techniques severly limit possibilities and constrained possibilities are searched more quickly.

Use long passwords. The longer they are, the more difficult (compute costly) they are to break.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on October 7, 2015 using texi2html 1.82.