Though I am not am alarmist, digital security is on many of our minds these days with all of the breaches that we are hearing about in the news.

In our recent “Down with Digital Clutter” workshop, my team and I shared the following tips for keeping your passwords and data secure.

Password Security

1. Smart passwords

Of course one of the safest ways to ensure that your passwords are not easy to discern is the use a different password for every service and to choose passwords that are nonsense and have no words or meaning.  The risks of re-using passwords should not be dimissed if you wish to remain safe on-line.

But then how can you remember them?

One trick is to use a number or symbol in the place of a letter in a word that you can remember.  For example if the word bookshelf is meaningful to you, you might replace one or both of the Os with the number zero. You might also replace the S with the number three. If you choose to incorporate a capital letter, be sneaky and put it in the middle of the word rather than using a capital of the first letter. You might choose to place an ! in the place of an L or an I.  Incorporating all of these ideas in the example here would give you B00K3he!f in place of bookshelf.

2. Password managers

Use a password manager for a secure central solution for password storage and retrieval. One popular resource for ensuring digital security is 1password. Check out this article which includes a review of 1password and explains why you need a password manager.

1 password has been recommended in PC Magazine, and on the Kojo Namde show!

Infoworld offers an up to date comparison of password managers for computer and mobile devices here.

For a review of 1password for the Mac, check out this article from MacWorld.