My personal website got hacked not so long ago.
It fell victim to a sustained ‘brute force’ attack, bombarded by hacker bots for days until they finally got in. They must have thought that my site contained credit card information or personal details of clients. The web hosting platform took the site off line, which was part of their service and it was subsequently cleaned up. Now of course I am back, with extra security and better password management. I now have SSL so there is an HTTPS:// prefix to my site.
But how or why did this happen?
Leave princess in the Barbie house*
Simple passwords. Before you say it, no I don’t use ‘Princess’, ‘MyPassword123’ or any of the usual lazy give-aways listed on all the antivirus, malware or computer assist websites. I had a 12 character password that was relatively strong. It was a question of fairly basic security and simple mathematics. My 12 character password was OK, being 26 possibilities to the power of 12. But any persistent hacker with the right software could get through it eventually. Now I have 32 character passwords (26 to the power of 32, that’s a lot of zero’s).
But I also have 102 on line accounts. Yes that’s right, 102.
This raises an interesting question. How the hell do you remember the all the passwords, let alone manage all of your accounts which have such long passwords? The answer, a password manager.
Just so you know, I am not in the business of selling password management software. I am a Hotelier, but I am happy to let you know what works for me. I did a reasonable amount of on line research. I read reviews, spoke to colleagues, looked at the simplicity of use, convenience, portability and so on.
I eventually settled on Last Pass. I mostly use it from my Mac but you can access it from iPad and iPhone. There is an Android version as well. It has taken the worry out of remembering passwords and has added a greater layer of security, as well as peace of mind. One master password gets you into the system. You only need to remember that particular one and the system takes care of the rest. And yes, it’s a very big password.
Be warned folks, get long and complex passwords, a good password manager or be prepared for the worst. Leave princess in the Barbie house.
