welcome to the organic green doctor blog

i am a family physician who was diagnosed with
early mild cognitive impairment(mci) amnestic type on december 21, 2010
this is a precursor to alzheimers disease
because of this diagnosis i have opted to stop practicing medicine
this blog will be about my journey with this disease
please feel free to follow me along this path
i will continue blogging on organic gardening, green living,
solar power, rainwater collection, and healthy living
i will blog on these plus other things noted to be interesting

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

making a safer password

MAKING A SAFER PASSWORD

the other day i saw this picture on a friends facebook page
i dont remember whose page it was to give them credit for posting it

i am not a computer nerd or guru so i rely on folks who do this for a living
i read each morning several feeds from the computer goddess kim komando at komando.com
she keeps up with everything in the computer world

also
the other day someone was making a joke about my password i had made up for one of my internet connections since it was 12 letters long
according to this graph it would take 3000 years to hack that password
when it gets hacked i wont have to worry about it

i looked at some folks passwords for their accounts we use some
one would take 2 days to hack
another one would take 2 mins
another was instantly

my bank accounts and financial accounts and medical accounts have numbers upper and lower case letters and symbols and range from 8-12 characters
any new password is now 12 characters long 
those new passwords would take 3,000 years to hack
those mixed 8 character accounts would take 39 minutes to hack
thats scary since some important accounts arent protected as much as i would like them to be

remember if your email accounts get hacked there may be a lot of info in your emails that can be accessed by hackers

looking at my facebook accounts
they all have the mixed passwords with 10 characters 
it will take about 5 months for hackers to hack my facebook accounts
ill need to add two more characters to them

based on how many folks that are facebook friends that are getting hacked i suspect they have unsafe passwords that are a hackers password dream

if this chart is true then i have some work to do to protect my sensitive accounts
my goal is to change them to a mixed password of 12 characters so it will take hackers a few thousand years to hack my accounts

yep
i realized im not as protected as i need to be

take a close look at your passwords
look at the graph above to see how safe they are
change them if they are going to be easily hacked

here is how i do my passwords
i find a sentence out of a book or newspaper etc 
i take the first letter of each word in the sentence and use it
i randomly stick in a symbol or two
i drop in a few letters
some letters i capitalize
eg
using that first sentence in the above paragraph
the password would be
H1$!dm638p9x
that password should be good for 3,000 years

none of my passwords are easy to remember
i use them to test my memory each day
i have 7 of these passwords like this that i do from memory each morning
for me
it reassures me that i am not likely to get hacked but also that my memory is probably intact

lets not make it easy for the hackers to gain access to our important accounts

the organicgreen doctor

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