These are highlights, notes, and links from my presentation given at the main branch of the Framingham Public Library on Friday, July 7, 2017. I also did a brief blog post on Password Managers.
Some of the presentation might seem intimidating or scary. Don’t let this concern you. I assure you, you can do everything we will talk about.
Smartphones
- Use a password on your smartphone
- Use numbers/characters rather than the dots pattern or fingerprint scanner
- Use at least 10 digits (as many as you can)
- Use a pattern (on the number pad) or a long pass phrase
- Encrypt your phone
Computers and the Web
- Encrypt your computer (This is harder to do than for your phone. I recommend getting help. I can help you if you are interested. Contact me.)
- Standard recommendations:
- Use unique passwords on every site
- Use at least 20 to 25 characters in each password
- Use a completely random sequence of characters
- How can we possibly do the above and still remember all our passwords? You can’t! Use a password manager.
- You only need to remember one password (your “master password”) which should be actually be a long pass phrase
- Use the password manager to generate unique individual passwords for each account
- Your password manager remembers all your passwords for you
- There are links to the most popular password managers and reviews of them in this blog post
- Here I demonstrated the password manager I use (KeePass)
Use Two Factor Authentication (2FA) Whenever You Can
- What is it?
- 2FA on Gmail (video)