Is "monkey" your password?

A while back I wrote about passwords and how to tell if yours has been compromised.  Meanwhile, I have been watching the news with fascination regarding many of the well-publicized password leaks and breaches, and have been amused at some of the popular passwords.  Seems like there are a lot of basketball fans out there who like to use "jordan" as their passwords in honor of Michael Jordan.  There are also a lot of profane passwords, as well as "password," "12345678," and other simple passwords.  

One password that was amusing to me -- and for which I have no explanation -- is the popularity of "monkey" as a password.  It showed up pretty high on LinkedIn, Gawker, Sony, and a few others…who knew?

Anyway, I recently ran across an info graphic that I think does a nice job of putting the password complexity in context, and I thought I'd share it here.  Pretty interesting to see how minor increases in the length and complexity of your password can make a huge difference.  And remember - the Pros are the guys you should be worried about - not the "Noob" hackers.

Your iPad sucks - here are 6 examples why

"Your iPad sucks" - ?!?  OK, I was just trying to be dramatic.  I really like my iPad, but I've had a number of discussions with people recently who want to get rid of their laptops and only use their iPads.  I don't think I'll ever get to that point.  Why?  Because I think the iPad is inadequate for some critical business tasks.  Here are 6 examples:

• Working in more than one app at once.  Sure you can switch around between apps on the iPad, but when you really need to have two apps open at the same time (for example, putting a lot of elements of data from a spreadsheet into a Word doc, that switching back & forth is maddening.  The iPad's lack of true multitasking, along with its fullscreen-only presentation model don't cut it when it comes to multitasking.
• Managing files. Managing files on an iPad is very difficult - the security restrictions on iOS alone make this a nightmare.  When you extend this to content-sharing / collaboration sites (Sharepoint is one example) it is very challenging to do any sort of complex file management.  Even DropBox and iCloud, which are fairly iPad-friendly, make file management painful beyond a few rudimentary functions.
• Managing email, especially offline.  My biggest pet peeve with iOS?  I can't delete email when I'm not online.  Often, I like to take advantage of flight time to clean up email.  The iPad is fine for responding to emails but you can't delete or file email when you are not online.  This makes it impossible for me to consider the iPad as my primary email client.  Combine this limitation with the lack of good file management (for attaching files, for example), and it falls short of productive.
• Multi-channel social media.  If you want to monitor multiple avenues of social media and online content, you're going to want a "real computer."  If you want to monitor Twitter and Facebook, you can sort of do that with clients like TweetDeck.  However, if you also want to follow a few RSS feeds, read a blog, along with monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yammer, and things like that - and you want to do it while getting your day job done at the same time - you'll quickly hit a wall, even with the fancy new Android-like notification tray in iOS 5.  
• Content production.  Whether you are producing music, video, doing photo editing, etc. you will be far more productive on a real PC than you will on an iPad.  Yes, I know - you can do basic editing, apply filters, and things like that on the iPad.  But if you want to get real work done, pull out your PC.
• Spreadsheet work.  When reviewing and editing spreadsheets, the iPad just frustrates me - I want to be able to zoom, move around, select multiple cells, look at function references while creating formulas, and things along those lines.  I just can't do that on my iPad.  Maybe I could use several iPads together…nah.

These are just 6 reasons I will be using my PC for real work.  I'll still use my iPad for content consumption, meeting notes, on-the-fly research, etc. and taking advantage of its 10-hour battery life as much as possible, but I won't be ditching my laptop any time in the foreseeable future.

What about you - have you successfully moved away from computers to using your iPad as you sole / primary device?  What have you learned and have you successfully overcome any of the obstacles above?

Should you change your password?

There have been a lot of well-publicized data breaches in the news lately, and I always wonder if I've been affected by them.  When credit card data is affected, you get a letter from your bank or card issuer (I've gotten a few), but when it comes to web site hacks that go after passwords, you never know.  Or do you?

I'd like to share a couple of resources you can use to find out whether you should be concerned, as well as a couple of things to help you increase your password effectiveness in the future.

Find out if you've been a victim

A site called "ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com" has aggregated (as of this post) 11,802,026 compromised passwords from a large number of the publicly disclosed data breaches.  If you go to the site and enter your email address, it will tell you if your email shows up in the list of compromised accounts.  In my case, I've been breached at least once, as the graphic below shows.

My password was compromised in the Gawker Media breach but, fortunately, I used a unique password so my exposure is very limited.  I also changed my password the moment I found out (Gawker was very responsible in their notification, and I knew within a few days).

Other sites you can use to find out if your password's been compromised include:

• LinkedIn leaked password checker
• eHarmony leaked password checker

 Stronger passwords in the future

If you want to protect yourself better in the future, here are some tips that can help:

• Use different passwords for each site you visit
• Use complex passwords (mixture of upper & lower case, numbers, random characters that aren't in the dictionary, etc.)
• Don't write your passwords down

The challenge with this is that it makes it nearly impossible to remember what password belongs to which site.  To make it easier, I recommend using a "password vault" that can generate complex passwords for you and then help you remember them.  The best ones are multi-platform, never store your data in an unencrypted form, and allow you to share your password data securely across multiple devices.

I've tried quite a few of them and the one I like best is called "1Password."  It works on Mac, Windows, Android, iPhone, iPad, and I've been using it faithfully for a couple of years.  It stores an encrypted data file on your system (the makers of 1Password don't store your passwords on their own systems), and it easily shares your encrypted password data using Dropbox as the conduit.

1Password also has the ability to store other information such as credit card numbers, software license keys, and more.  It can also generate and stores secure passwords for you, which makes it easy to satisfy the tips I mention above.

If you want to take a more manual approach, there is a good "personal algorithm" method using Steve Gibson's "Password Haystacks" model, detailed on the Gibson Research Corp. site.  This is also a great educational site on how longer passwords offer exponentially more security.