Passwords – don’t they drive you MAD?!

OK – so we have to have them, otherwise who knows what information would be leaked on to the www?

But I feel there must be an easier way.

I now have a number of passwords – for business stuff, personal stuff and financial stuff – but over the years there’s been a bit of blurring of the lines between them, so I can never quite be sure which password I should be using.

Plus for each password there are 4 variants: do I input all lower case or use a leading capital? Is it the word alone or with a number ‘1’ after? Some websites insist on including digits, but they never remind you when you’re using them 6 months later!

I guess we have to play along with it, but sometimes it’s all too much, so then we hit the ‘forgot password’ button, only to find that the password we try and change the computer-generated one to, turns out to be ‘already in use’ – presumably by us! Aaarrgghhh. Fail!

So what are we supposed to do about it? Research shows that men are more likely to use unsafe passwords than women, younger people are more likely to share their passwords than older people, and online fraud has increased threefold since 2010 – to 12 million pieces of data traded by fraudsters!

So don’t let that be you. Keep plugging away at your passwords. Make them complicated. Change them regularly. Don’t share them. I know they drive you and me completely INSANE, but the alternative is even worse!