Use a Strong Password

Last week the Earth “celebrated” World Password Day:

This day was created to raise awareness about the importance of using strong passwords.

World Password Day was established in 2013 and is observed on the first Thursday in May.

A strong password helps you keep your personal information safe and prevents someone else from getting into your account.

Were you aware? I wasn’t, until it was mentioned by a friend. I looked it up and, sure enough, there’s a day for that.

The article linked above gives sound advice, among the tips:

Create a strong and complex password: Use 8 characters or more. It can be any combination of letters, numbers and symbols.

Make them long enough and, where applicable, follow the guideline of the site providing password strength feedback.

Make your password unique: Do not use your YouTube account password on other sites. If another site gets hacked, the password could be used to enter your YouTube account. …

Avoid personal information and common words: Do not use personal information like your birthdays, common words like “password” or common patterns like “1234.”

Certainly a person ought to also avoid using easily discovered facts about oneself, such as personal characteristics or proclivities that might help a nefarious actor deduce likely passwords.

For example, a recent article about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop provides an example of a particularly weak and obvious password.

The computer repairman who unfortunately was called upon to recover data from Biden’s damaged laptop recalled his password as being: analf**k69 (presumably two asterisks were substituted within the article for “u” and “c” in the actual password).

To illustrate how remarkably weak Biden’s chosen password was, I refer back to the conversation with my friend, who tipped me to World Password Day in the first place.

Asked to guess Biden’s password, my friend replied, “Eat me.”

Close, but no cigar. (And no scurrilous euphemism intended).

So, you see, knowing what by now most people who are paying attention know about Biden from his own laptop (see evidence at the link), it wouldn’t take long for a determined guesser, continuing along the same lines as my friend, to come up with the actual password.

We can learn, in so many ways, from Biden’s “mistakes.”

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