White Wizard

Stupid Password

September 19, 2005 on 4:40 pm | In Geek | 1 Comment

Grrrr. I was going to blog about something else, but I am frustrated right now because I couldn’t remember my own password to get into my own blog! Argghh!

So, how many passwords do you have? Let me count mine:

• I occasionally use one from when I was in high school
• I have a standard one that everyone related to me knows
• The bank
• My university
• My job
• The Bookexchange
• My gmail account
• Another bank
• Amazon.com
• And one more that I think I’ve only used once

Let’s see, that makes 1, 2, … 10 passwords! Bleh. Oh wait, I have to remember another one to administer the bookexchange, so, that makes 11. Grrrr.

Oh, here’s a little something: Say you sign up for a forum, for example, this forum. After you sign up, if you forget your password, you can request that it be sent to you via email.

Now think about that. Hmmm. Okay, what this most likely means is that your password is stored in plain text on their database! Now, suppose you are the conniving forum administrator (just for a second). It would be fairly easily to take your username and password that I have in my database and go try ebay, paypal, a couple bank sites… you get the picture?

So, moral of the story: if you are a regular user: never use your high security password to register for a site that you don’t trust or you aren’t sure about (online forums, clubs, blogs, ).