What’s Your Favorite Color?

KEEPER

Stop! What is your name?

GALAHAD

Sir Galahad of Camelot.

KEEPER

What is your quest?

GALAHAD

I seek the Holy Grail.

KEEPER

What is your favorite color?

GALAHAD

Blue. No yel– Auuuuuuuugh!

The problem with managing your passwords is you can’t win.  You have to choose between doing it right or doing it easy.    Do it right and it’s a pain the butt.  Do it easy and you’ll get hacked. 

If you do it right, you use unique, long, random passwords for every website you use.  But then you have to keep track of them somehow, which probably means a massive sheet of paper hidden in your coffee table.

If you do it easy, you use some variation of the same password which is probably short and contains personal information so you can remember it. 

Does any of that sound familiar? 

Most people choose “easy” because “right” is such a pain in the butt. 

If you choose easy, you’ll eventually get hacked.  And it won’t be because of a data breach at a big company.  It’ll be because your password sucks and a hacker guessed it. 

Hackers hack by finding out your personal information from social media and then “guessing” with special hacker software that tries hundreds of combinations of your personal information.

How hard is it to figure out your kids’ names?  Or your birthdate?  Or your hometown?  Or your favorite sports team? 

Not very.

So if you don’t want to get hacked, you have to do it “right”.

Lucky for you, we live in 2017.  Doing it right is no longer a pain in the butt.  In fact, doing it right is actually easier than doing it easy. 

Two words:  Password. Manager.

There’s a lot of them out there.  Personally, I use the one by Intel called TrueKey.

Here’s how they work:

  1. You download the app.
  2. You memorize one login – the one to the password manager.
  3. Each time you enter a login on a website, it will save the username and password to the password manager.

The next time you go to that website, it automatically populates your username and password. 

It will also randomly generate a password for you.  You can then create passwords like the ones all the cybersecurity experts recommend:

  • 16+ digits
  • Upper and lower case
  • Numbers and symbols
  • Random combination

Instead of using three variations of “joeybobby1952” for all of your passwords, you now have “9IibsIOJD9fW!x$o4W8JDmQyElxYq9” for one of your passwords and something totally different and completely random for every other login you use. 

To keep you safe, I will be providing all of my financial planning clients an annual subscription to the one I use – Intel TrueKey. 

If you’d like to take me up on my offer, please let me know and I’ll help you get set up. 

Just don’t forget your favorite color…