This week’s guest blog is written by Richard Fincher from Room 101.
For the last 700 years, at the Tower of London, at around 10pm, something similar to the following refrain is heard during the changing of the watchman's shift:
"Halt! Who goes there?'
'The keys.'
'Whose keys?'
'Queen Elizabeth's keys.'
'Pass Queen Elizabeth's keys, all is well.'
What's the point of a tradition like that? Most traditions can seem pretty pointless and quaint, but they may have served a useful purpose hundreds of years ago, and there was a time when the Tower of London really did keep a silent watch and ward o'er London Town and its Golden Hoard (as W. S. Gilbert once put it.)
Today, the last line of defence over each of our personal finances, tends to be a password. These things go with us everywhere, just like the keys on our key rings, and so it's quite natural for us to personalise them further with keychains, maybe a Toyota one, or a Tenerife one, or a Trinity College one or even a Tottenham one. But there's a big difference here, whilst stealing your key ring requires physical access to it, stealing (or guessing) your password can be done by any of the billions of people in the world with internet access.
So, rather than look at passwords like a car number plate (and who wouldn't want a personalised car number plate rather than a random one), it's very important to treat them more like biros. In our lives, we probably use thousands of biros. They come and go all the time, we're always losing them, being given new ones, sometimes branded ones, but we seldom get upset upon needing to suddenly switch to using a new biro when we can't find our present one (unless we're King Charles of course, but it seems many things irritate him!)
When was the last time you changed your passwords? A year ago? Ten years ago? Even if you told no one your password, if it's more than 3 or 4 years old, there's a good chance it's appeared on one of the many lists of 300 million stolen passwords which hackers have access to. There are also now automated password-guessing robots which labour night and day to try all combinations one by one, starting with the obvious ones (such as sports team names, popular children's names, and so on.
So on World Password Day, here is my tip for coming up with a password which is suitably random, but which you can easily remember.
First, think of a line from a song, poem, book or movie that you like. It should be a line containing more than 10 words, for example: “God Save Our Gracious King, Long Live Our Noble King”. Next, try picking the first letter of each word as follows: gsogkllonk - there’s your random password. Try inserting a capital letter or two, or changing one of the characters if you like, for example g$ogklloNK.
Richard is an internet guru and knows more about the internet and internet security than most of Silicon Valley put together. If you need help with DNS, web hosting, email hosting or any other question that is baffling you, he’s your man. Find him at www.Room101.co.uk