Learning Password Protection – Securing Your Account

Password protection begins with you the account holder. Protect your account like it was your own bank account and you will be safe. The following password tips will help you to thwart of would be hackers.

In the world of online gambling, there are certain elements a user can control and elements that are basically out of your hands. You should always be protected by the latest anti-virus and spyware protection software. If you have an online account that requires a password, then please, read on.

Password protection is entirely in your hands. You have the ability, from the start, to generate a password that is unique to each and every site requiring a login. Yes, it can become cumbersome as your list of passwords grows, but there are programs out there designed specifically to help you with this task as we will discuss later.

In the following article you’ll find the best methods of generating your passwords for your online accounts. Learning this can prove invaluable, especially if you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who have their computers hacked everyday. You’ll learn useful information about what not to use when creating your password, as well as the most reliable methods of creating secure passwords. Lastly, you’ll find the best ways to store your passwords without putting yourself at risk from hackers.

Secure Password Generation Best Practices

If you’ve registered with an online gambling site, then you’ve probably already been issued a password set by the company you’ve chosen. Many times, the online gambling site will prompt you to change your password, either through the preferences or options menu, to something more memorable and personal to you. When presented with the task of generating a new password, you need to consider two main ideas.

First, the characters which are available to be used by the site, whether it is numerals, letters or special characters, such as the asterisk or pound sign. Check the sites limitations for number of characters used, if they allow number and letter combinations and if they allow special characters to be used. Secondly is the ability of the password you select, given the system’s limitations, to be found by hackers. Believe it or not, there are those who try to get access to user’s passwords, and for the most part, they aren’t doing it for practice.

Let’s first consider character limitations, which are custom set by the individual online gambling sites. Unfortunately, those sites may not always have their users anonymity in mind, and do not allow upper-case and lower-case variations of characters. Additionally, there are other limitations that are set by the gambling sites, which we’ll discuss a little bit later. For now, let’s concentrate on choosing a secure password that one may not be able to guess.

What Not to Use When Choosing a Password

Simply put, many people trust the internet. They send passwords through email and send credit card and bank account numbers to un-secure sites. It is not always obvious, especially to new online gamblers, that this is not at all a safe practice. Your password is virtually the only thing that can save you from having your online gambling account hacked, which can lead to emptying the balance of your account. When you choose your password, there are several things you should absolutely, positively not even think about doing.

First, do not, under and circumstances use real words as your password. It may seem like no small feat to find a password that isn’t a real word, after all, it may seem like a safe thing to choose a word that is related to you, and you may think it is not obvious to others. Therein lies the problem. Many people choose words unique to their own life, such as the name of their college, their fraternity name, their pets name, their maiden name and so on. Anyone who spends a limited amount of time with you has a fairly good chance of guessing your password based on the few facts they may know about you. The good news is that some online gambling sites do not let you simply guess your password an unlimited amount of times. Often, the system will lock itself if the registered password is not entered within 5-10 tries. This is to deter people from guessing your password. However, the system will almost always unlock itself after a certain amount of time passes, or the correct password is entered.

Secondly, do not use names, whether they are your kid’s names or the name of your favorite pet. Logically, these are usually the first few guesses that people use to crack your password, garnering them access to your account, i.e. your money.

Birthdays are another common password. Often, people use their birthday as the digits in their username, for example “JSmith32982”. Having your birthday as your password allows anyone who knows when you were born access to your online gambling account. Also, never equate your username with your password; it is much too simple for a hacker to decipher.

Lastly, four digit pins are used for passwords. Many times, through the sites password protection policy, you must use more than four characters anyway, but there are occasions that allow you to custom set your password for any amount of characters. Setting a four-digit pin as your password is a big mistake. largely because most of you use the same pin number to access your bank’s ATM card or the voicemail on your cellular phone. Guessing this four digit pin, which can be done using any number of computation methods, will allow the hacker access to not only your online gambling site of choice, but also your voicemail and bank account to make purchases online.

The biggest problem with passwords is that many people use the same password for all of their online needs. The password they use for their Amazon.com account may be the same for their bank account. We cannot stress strongly enough how much of a mistake this can become. Once one password is cracked, it will then be used on all other accounts the hacker or hackers know you are using online.

Password Creation You SHOULD Be Using

You should always use randomly generated combinations of the following: upper and lower case characters, numbers and special characters. This makes for the most difficult password to crack. Look at all the numbers, letters and special characters on your keyboard and imagine trying to figure out an eight character password using a combination of all of them. Even the most sophisticated algorithms will have a difficult time coming up with your personal password. It is simply too time consuming for a computer hacker to crack. For the most part, if a hacker does not decipher your password in the first few minutes, they will move on to a user that has an easier password to crack.

Using randomly generated passwords makes for a strong and reliable password.

Continually using randomly generated passwords will alleviate a lot of worry in the long run. Think of how time consuming it would be to go through each of your accounts and get the system administrator to change your passwords once one has been acquired by a hacker. Not to mention the risk you’re taking with your financial security.

Storing Your Passwords Securely

Now that you’ve created a unique password that is secure from online hackers, you must ask yourself: “Where should I store my passwords?” Being careless in storing your passwords can be more hazardous than creating generics passwords. Many users have dozens, sometimes hundreds of passwords to keep of. And keeping those passwords hidden from wandering eyes is undoubtedly a very important task.

In the age of technology, the most common method for thieves to steal your passwords is the tried and true method of dumpster diving. Many passwords are discovered by those who rummage through your garbage, finding those slips of paper you’ve written your passwords on. Suffice to say, don’t simply throw those papers away, burn them or shred them. Along with your passwords, thieves can find bank account statements that have your bank account numbers, credit card statements or online account information, making it easy to match up the password with the account. These types of paper should always be properly discarded. Better still, don’t write down your passwords. It is so simple to find free programs with sophisticated encryption systems that will hide your password from would be thieves.

Since many users know better than to write their passwords on paper, they choose to keep track of their passwords in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word, thinking this is a great way to keep things in order. While in theory this is a successful organizational method, it is not secure. Anyone with access to your computer, both physically or by hacking into it, can see your files and read your passwords. You may think that by locking your files that you’ve secured them, but again, you need to create a password to lock your file, and if you’ve read this far, you know what can happen.

Instead of writing passwords down or storing them on file, find a password managing program can be as easy as performing a simple search on the internet. You may think these are expensive, but they are often absolutely free to download from the internet. Software such as KeePass or KeyWallet are free, and they aren’t just for trial versions. Well respected RoboForm does password management and also doubles as a form filler to eliminate the tedious task of always filling in common form fields. RoboForm is consistently ranked as one of the top programs any web user can buy to protect oneself on the net. Often times the free programs are as equally featured as the paid software. These password storage programs have highly technical encryption devices that halt hackers from viewing your cluster of passwords.

Additionally, these storage programs can also create unique passwords for you, given that many accounts let you customize your password. In the event that your account has password limitations, the storage program can take those limitations into consideration when creating your password, meaning that if you can only use 8-10 characters, the software will recognize that and create a fitting password. Also, KeePass has a nice feature that generates a random password by random mouse strokes. This is something to definitely keep in mind because Trojans and keyloggers can allow would be hackers to see your key strokes. Again, this is why you always have to ensure you are running a good, up-to-date antivirus software program to protect against these type of malware.

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So what have we learned about password protection? First, don’t use real words or names as passwords, anyone that spends time with you could probably guess your password with enough opportunity. Second, create unique passwords for each account you have, and never use the same password more than once. Last, store your passwords wisely. Even if you take this advice and make your passwords extremely difficult to crack, it is all useless if a thief finds the slip of paper or the spreadsheet you’re keeping track of your passwords on.

Remember, passwords are stolen everyday and account balances can be emptied with a click of the mouse. Don’t let something so preventable happen to you. Generate your passwords wisely, and you can enjoy many years of secure and worry-free online gambling.