We have all probably had the case of "Email account hacked, it's time to change some passwords." It is an age old tale. I have had it happen to me a couple of times on different email accounts. Each time, I contemplate the closing of the account that was hacked and yet for some nostalgic reasoning I never do it.
I identified two things in this audit of my online profile. For most of the places that I go the login name and the password acts like two independent safeguard mechanisms. And that is mostly deals with depending on the site being visited I might not have been there early enough to get my desired username and had to settle on some variation of that identity ( depending on the rules this could be tricky ) and then depending on the arbitrary security rules the password I use is another hoop to jump thru. More often than not, I end up having to do about a dozen attempts just to find a username / password combination that works. This becomes cumbersome at time, especially when I need to change a password.
The last round of changing passwords ( beyond the 90 day password policy at work ) I spent 5 hours locating where to change a password and then getting them to comply with the password standards of the various sites i frequent. The only reason I persisted and actually changed the passwords was that for a majority of the accounts I was running I was either using an older email account I didn't regularly open and wanted to change that or because the password the site was using was based on a compromised password. So I changed them all and in the process I was thinking of pruning my social network down to just what i regularly and actively use. Than I realized, I had reasons not to eliminate them all
- I have a Twitter account. I have it to basically catalog a basic list of feeds that I will occasionally log into read (without having to remember the correct hash tag). I have never posted to it. Yet I have it. At one point here recently I had this great idea of using it and a tool to trend hash tags i was interested in to see if there were changes, so i could be notified to actually log into Twitter. This got as far as being able to pull the tag info automatically but no reporting built around it.
- I have a Pinterest account. This one I actually was trying to find a way to gather seemingly 'useful' information ( read recipes ) from the site and catalog them for future use. I thought at one point I had a crawler working but the account it used got locked out. I started another account, but haven't gotten back to that project.
- I have others all with similar purposes.
I keep telling people I have plans for the various things, and yet after I work on something; there always seems to be something else waiting in the wings to take over the immediate attention. I am going to get back to all of them at some point. I am just not sure that it is going to be any time soon.
Oh well. The result of all of this. I realized I had too many passwords again. Stupid forking of information everytime I turn around and have another login to create. And now I am going to have to see if i can codify them into a set that is both secure and remember-able.
~j
