Strong password security is no joking matter

Historic City News encourages readers to avoid using short, easy to remember, duplicate, or otherwise weak passwords for your online accounts.

We’ve recently investigated and verified a password security breach that resulted in the creation of several user accounts to a client’s Internet website hosted by our company.  The intrusion was crude but the damage done was significant.  Nearly a week’s time was spent recovering, repairing and fortifying the security to the website.

If you would like a free tool to generate strong passwords, we can recommend PASSINATOR PASSWORD GENERATOR.  There are others on the Internet, but this one has very strong default settings, including an element of random length, and a large character set from which to draw.

The PASSINATOR web application, available from GreenEngineer.org and TaylorMoulton.org, generates passwords on your computer, so the string of characters is never transmitted between your device and the web server.  That vulnerability is common in other online password generators.  The short and clear source code is made explicitly available on the website.

Strong passwords generated by PASSINATOR are made randomly from combinations of at least 16 characters using lower and upper case characters, numbers, and special characters.

This incident might have been avoided if our client had regularly changed their passwords and used a stronger password.  Keep your passwords secure using only encrypted password management software.