Upgrade your passwords - secure your accounts

[Northmount]

Over the past couple months, there has been a lot of spam posted.  Some is a new user just registered to post spam.

There are other cases where they have broken into accounts by hacking the password to the account.  Several of these cases have been older accounts where the user has only posted once, and may not be following leatherworker.net any more.  If you are using simple passwords or common passwords like "123", "password", "qwerty", etc.  PLEASE UPGRADE YOUR PASSWORD. 

There are lists of common passwords available on the net.  These hackers run those lists against a username login and in many cases have a match within 2 to 5 seconds.

Some of these spammers are from Montreal, New York, and other cities, or may be using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to hide their IP address and location, so they can be from anywhere.

If your account is hacked and you are not a frequent user, I will simply mark the user as a spammer and you will no longer have access to post here.  I've given up trying to get these one time users to change their passwords as it is just a waste of my time.  To the rest of you that are frequent users, just upgrade your password so it's not easy to crack.

Kaspersky is in the cyber security business.  How to make strong passwords.

[tsunkasapa]

A friend is an IT professional for a major corporation. He once told me that if you use your pet's name for your password I can get all your information in 5 minutes. My response was "I have 23 dogs. IF you can figure out which one I used, you STILL need to find what their birthday is." His was "23 dogs? Who the hell has 23 dogs?" 

[Mablung]

  On 5/17/2024 at 3:33 PM, tsunkasapa said:

A friend is an IT professional for a major corporation. He once told me that if you use your pet's name for your password I can get all your information in 5 minutes. My response was "I have 23 dogs. IF you can figure out which one I used, you STILL need to find what their birthday is." His was "23 dogs? Who the hell has 23 dogs?" 

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I've got his question as well.    I love my Husky/German Shepherd mix, but she's quite enough to handle on her own.

[fredk]

Over the years I have owned or driven several hundred motor vehicles. I drove 'professionally' as a postman. Thus I use the make of vehicle, the type and its registration number for my passwords. BUT I mix them up, like this; Honda Swift VCZ9621, comes from three different vehicles, and I change the order too

And I keep a little black book with them all written down

[tsunkasapa]

  On 5/17/2024 at 6:32 PM, Mablung said:

I've got his question as well.    I love my Husky/German Shepherd mix, but she's quite enough to handle on her own.

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I have working sled dogs. I have had as many as 63 dogs and puppies at one time. Now that I'm old, I've cut back to just 10. 

[Mablung]

  On 5/18/2024 at 1:50 PM, tsunkasapa said:

I have working sled dogs. I have had as many as 63 dogs and puppies at one time. Now that I'm old, I've cut back to just 10. 

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Ahh, that makes far more sense. 

[Mulesaw]

I use either the vehicle inspired passwords, or I use song that is translated into a password.

A lot of places requires both capital letters, special signs, small letters and a number to accept your password, and the song trick works for me, you just replace the words in the songs first line or refrain or whatever part you like with either letters, special signs or figures.

Old Mc Donald had a farm, the verse with a cow could be: Aot#hh1C (And on that farm he had 1 cow) I know it is supposed to be a cow, but in this case it doesn't matter.

On another note: Spammers are annoying, and generally I think that @Northmount and the rest of the moderators are doing a great job in keeping a tight ship. There is very little spam that compared to what you would expect given the number of users etc. in here.

Brgds Jonas

[LCNCJohn]

So...I'm a bit late on this post because I only recently joined but, from a security standpoint, the days of easily remembered passwords are over unfortunately. 

With the password lists that Northmount mentioned, modern technology, those "fun" posts on social media that exist to get your personal info (your porn name is your middle name + the street you grew up on) etc., it's generally, not a great idea to use any personal information in a password these days at all. 

What I do and what I recommend to my users and clients is to use a password manager/generator. The way it works is that you set up a vault in something like Norton or Zoho (free option for personal use) and set a master password on the vault. The vault then stores all of your logins and these programs have password generators which will have some number of randomly generated uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters etc. As long as you know your vault password, you never actually have to remember a log in and, depending on the length and complexity, the time to crack the passwords they generate can be "longer than the age of the universe"

I also ALWAYS recommend setting up Multi Factor Authentication whenever possible. You'd be amazed at how many times I've tried to log into an email account from China or something....

[AEBL]

KeepassXC is a good, free, password manager. It also has support for TOTP (time-based one-time passwords ... the things that they want you to download Authy for and stuff like that). I believe that it also supports hardware tokens like YubiKey as well.

https://keepassxc.org/