Everyone has to have hundreds of passwords these days. It is the secure thing to do if you want to stop hackers breaking in to your highly confidential everyday chit chat. Or worse still stealing your bank details and ordering goodness knows what.
I first started with” John”. I knew I would be able to remember that and I reckoned that no hacker would think I would be stupid enough to use my name as a password.
Then my iPad told me I should include a number to be more secure, so my password became “John1”. But it also needed to be at least six characters, so I extended it to “John12”.
Each time I altered my password I had to remember to go back and update all the earlier versions, which was a bit of a pain, but still if was comforting to know I was more secure. And I could sill sleep at night!
“John12” was OK with me, but some websites didn’t seem to think it was secure enough if I wanted to order something from them. They recommended I use even more characters and punctuation marks….. and maybe an emoji or two. So now I am using :-
“John12345abcdefgh,.!?&#£()%=🏈⚽️🍺😀“
It’s a bit difficult to remember and I do get “timed-out” quite frequently, but nobody has figured the code out for the time being. So far so good.
Nonetheless I still was worried about the increasing sophistication of these hackers. So I contacted the master code-breakers at GCHQ, you can find their number in the yellow pages. They told me that since I didn’t know any “top secrets” and I didn’t have much money in the bank, I shouldn’t be to concerned. That’s a relief!