Passwords

[mrbill]

I am beside myself with the number of different passwords that are required these days. I use drake, and they have up-dated their security, leading to new numbers. Ero, ein, efin, efile password, etc. Am i alone ?

[Rapid Robert]

I am beside myself with the number of different passwords that are required these days. I use drake, and they have up-dated their security, leading to new numbers. Ero, ein, efin, efile password, etc. Am i alone ?

No, you are not alone in your discovery that you can't have both convenience and security at the same time. I have dozens if not hundreds of passwords, because I never use the same password at two different sites.

"ERO" is not a number, and there is no password associated with your EIN. Can you explain why you have anything more than one new password because of new security guidelines?

[Nashville]

Super Passwords

Much of the agenda at both of my seminars this year was Identity Theft and what the IRS is doing about it. Two startling statistics it seemed -- the large numbers of occurrences versus only a few hundred convictions. Justice departments everywhere tell us how much $$ it costs a state to successfully convict just one person on the average. Speaking from my own experience and for many rural towns here in the south, district attorneys often have the police to run suspects out of town than to get bogged down in so many cases.

A super password and a visual confirmation makes access more difficult, and most companies are insisting on this because they don't have a better or more effective device to protect themselves and us.

I learned at a back-to-basics seminar in Wisconsin that a six-digit lower-case alphabetic password can be successfully accessed by a random number generator in an average of 10 minutes. Add another digit and Upper-case and the access time dramatically increases. Many entities require eight-digits with a mixture of Upper Case, numeric, and special characters (!@#%^& etc) and the access time increases to 43 years.