I’m starting to think that the bane of my existence is having to come up with new passwords all the time. Remember when you got your first email address and how hard it was to come up with a password then? And back then it only needed to be five characters long, whereas now it has to be a minimum of eight, one of which has to be a letter or a number, as well as a symbol. It’s staring to look like were trying to break the German Enigma code from World War Two.
Cyber-security being what it is, the company I work for makes us change our passwords every few months, which is now up to nine characters. And you’re not allowed to use any of your old passwords either, it needs to be a totally new one. I also have three other personal email addresses, my phone password, and a few other passwords and security codes for various things that I need to remember as well. It’s getting tough to keep it all in my head, yet I can still remember the phone number I had as a kid. I think I know why they call them ‘the good old days’… all we had to remember was a few phone numbers. And if we couldn’t remember the numbers we could write them down without risking a security breach. If that were the case, the phone book would’ve been a hackers dream.
Canadians are notorious for poor cyber-security. Did you know that Canada has one of the highest number of passwords leaked per capita, and that the most common password in Canada is 123456? How can someone think that’s safe? Canada also has the biggest number of country-related passwords, such as “toronto”, “montreal”, “canada”, “canada1”. We really need to improve our originality.
Don’t forget to vote for me for Best Blog in the BOB Awards at panow.com. Oh, and you’ll need a password to login and vote… sorry.
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