Security by Frank Wickham: Be Secure!

Today I had to reset my password on two of my web based accounts. Managing these all to familiar accounts has become a real chore for me. The root of the problem is that I refuse to write them down on a post-it note and my memory isn't as sharp as it once was. Like most of you I too will use several variations of the same word or words. Now these new Web 2.0 based systems have started to report back that I have used this password once before, it is too similar to the current password, or has to have more then one symbol in addition to alphanumerics.

I have also found it isn't always my failing memory that has denied me access. Each time I needed to access one of my employee health benefit accounts the password I had set at last use was not excepted and had to be reset. To my surprise my wife had been using the same account and would have the password reset each time she would need to access it. How could this be?

At home recently we had a problem with the monitor on our personal computer. As I was troubleshooting the problem I moved the monitor to find my wife's own post-it note with more then a half dozen username password combinations stuck under the monitor base. So it's not just me having problems. When confronted she commented that most of the time she couldn't find her list of passwords. So good luck to some specificly looking for them.

Extremely perplexed by the situation I turned to Google for advice and to my surprise here is what the Microsoft and Sun security experts had to say:

Microsoft's Jesper Johansson

Sun's Dr. Whitfield Diffie

Well the experts say it's ok to write them down?

-- Frank