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Heartbleed

Heartbleed is making my brain bleed.  We have 151 separate accounts, emails, and websites that require a password.  In the past, I admit, I have used the same password for more than one.  But come on, 150 different passwords was just impossible.  I had 37 different passwords but along came Heartbleed and now I have to come up with more than 150 different passwords with 8 characters, capital and small case letters, a symbol and a number, and wait there's more – I HAVE TO BE ABLE TO REMEMBER THEM!

What?  Okay.  So we spent 5 hours yesterday trying to come up with new passwords and figuring out which ones needed to be changed first.   We tried to follow the advice of the experts and come up with an easy to remember phrase and adapt it or use an anagram but really 150 of them?  We have a list of passwords that need to be changed and changed 3 before I gave up in brain fatigue.  It is an unbelievable task.  Of course, the very mass of data I handle online is exactly why secure passwords are so necessary.  That doesn't make the task easier. 


I am back at my desk this morning and ready to start changing passwords.    I decided that using the phrases and anagrams just wasn't feasible.  I will do it for the sites I access daily, but for the rest I am going to use the most complicated, least likely to be remembered passwords.  And since there is no way I could remember all of them I will have to make a list of the passwords.  It seems going old school (pen and paper) is the safest method.  It's that or just throw up my hands and hope I don't get hacked.  I think my best defense is to be eternally grateful that most sites have that wonderful little button "forgot password" because I don't know what I would do without it. 
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Comments

  1. Dennis TardanApril 15, 2014 at 7:49 AM

    You da "wo-man" and my hero for doing this and keeping us safe. Thank you sweetie.

    ReplyDelete

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