Knock Knock, Who’s there? And what’s your password?

Last Month, I talked about taking your notebook computer on the road with you. With all the shows happening in the industry, more and more people are taking their data with them.

Whether its email, pictures, or inventory, your notebook computer can be really useful during one of these road trips. It’s great to be able to open the old ThinkPad and find out what your sales have been for the past month. It’s also nice to watch the latest DVD in your hotel room or on the plane.

Just remember, when you put your data on a notebook, you have to be a little more careful. Where the computer goes, your secrets go.

A few months ago, I was at a programmers’ meeting and a colleague of mine said (jokingly, I hope) that he needed a new notebook computer and thought he better drop by the airport pretty soon to pick one up.

Scary! The fact is, though, that it happens. Just last week (as I’m writing this) one of my staff had a company computer with him while taking a little vacation. He was using a digital camera to take his vacation pictures and used the notebook computer to edit and save the images. The night before he was scheduled to get back, he called me to say that his hotel room had been broken into and that several items were missing. One was his guitar (man he loved that guitar) and another was, you guessed it, the company computer.

He lost all his vacation pictures, but the first thing I thought of was whether the source code for our software was on that machine – it wasn’t. (The source code is the really secret stuff that makes a computer program do what it does.) Now, we’re pretty careful with passwords, so even if the code was on the computer I doubt anyone would have been able to get it.

Can you imagine having your whole inventory list, including your COSTS get stolen? Or how about losing your list of clients, possibly including their purchasing habits or even credit card numbers? Software products like ours prompt you to do a backup every day, so you probably wouldn’t LOSE the information – you just don’t want it in someone else’s hands.

So if you DO take your computer with you, and you DO have all your accounts, clients, and email on it, you BETTER make sure that if you lose it, at least nobody will be able to get your information OUT if it.

There are many ways to do this. The most basic way is to use the computer’s, or Window’s security to keep the system from starting up without a password. Now, of all my clients, I don’t know ANY that use the windows password on their gallery computers on a regular basis. Heck, even I don’t use a password on MY desktop computer. I trust my staff (Shhh… I have to say that because they read these articles…) and besides, I can protect certain documents individually if I need to. So I don’t use a password on the machine I sit at every day…

But you can be sure that I have a good long password on my notebook. So it takes me an extra 10 seconds to type in a password when I’m sitting in the Airport and want to play solitaire – BIG DEAL ! At lease I know that if that programmer friend of mine comes around and lifts my computer, he won’t be able to start it up and get all MY data off of it. He won’t even be able to play solitaire on that machine without reformatting the hard disk!

YOU SHOULD NOT USE YOUR DOG’S NAME FOR YOUR PASSWORD.

The same goes for kids, spouses, parents, cars, phone numbers, and drinking buddies. A password like your pet’s name isn’t going to cut it. It’s nice – and it’s easy for you to remember, but a thief has WAYS of finding those little things out. You don’t really think your social security number is confidential do you? Don’t even think about it. That number is EVERYWHERE.

And don’t use short passwords. Passwords should be in a form you can remember (or work out) but that are hard to crack.

Passwords should always be at least 6 characters long. That’s just my number – someone else might say “Passwords should always be 8 characters long” – the point is, they should be LONG, not short.

Passwords should contain both letters and numbers. I like to include both Upper and Lower case. The best passwords for security are totally random passwords like aJh7rX4w. The problem is, if you forget something like that, even YOU won’t be able to play solitaire on your machine!

Maybe you could use your first girlfriend’s mother’s maiden name with a few numbers in the middle.

Have another look at this password from above - JaR128cHe932R. My name is J Archer. Most days, I can remember that. Alternate letters are capitalized. I can remember that. The numbers make it pretty difficult for a thief to crack but they’re easy for me to remember. 128 is a good computer number and 932 is 1 more for each digit of 128 (239) but reversed. And it goes 3 letters, 3 numbers, 3 letters, 3 numbers and a letter. I can remember that. But it would be REALLY hard for someone to GUESS that that is the password for my notebook computer (actually – that’s NOT the password) And if I was a little more paranoid, I could reverse everything and the password could be R239eHc821RaJ.

Actually, this is taking it to extremes. You don’t have to go this crazy, but do be a little careful.

Oh, another important thing. I know that LOTS of you like to use the same password for EVERYTHING. You have probably used the same password for every web site you have been to in the past 4 years. Well you know what? If you’ve been to 500 web sites and entered that password, then there are AT LEAST 500 companies that KNOW your normal password. And the way data is shared on the Internet these days, there’s probably a lot more folks that know it.

Using the same password may be fine for cruising web sites like amazon.com and ebay. But if you’re using the same password for your Merrill Lynch account, you may want to rethink!

I know, you can’t remember 500 different passwords. Here’s what I do. I have a file on my computer (I shouldn’t tell you this) that has all my passwords in it. THAT file has a good password on it that I can change regularly. I put all my other passwords in that file. So if I’m going to the American Airlines web site, I might have to look up my password in this file before I can log into the site. OK, I can live with that. Truth is, I have my Windows Browser set to remember passwords so that when I go back to a site, the password is usually already entered for me.

Here’s another thing to worry about. Do you have any tech people that work on your computer? Sometimes you HAVE to give your tech person your password. And sometimes you have to trust them to a very large extent. They’ll probably see your sales figures and might even find out what sites you visit on the Internet. You hope they’re trustworthy.

For me it’s like letting your doctor see you with your pants down. It goes with the job. They’re your doctors. But just because you let them see you naked in their office, doesn’t mean you would invite them over a party and let them help you get dressed for dinner.

I’ve had lots of clients that tell me their password for Masterpiece and then say they use the same password for everything. Ummmm…. HELLLLOOOOO… First – I DON’T WANT TO KNOW THAT. Second, you don’t really know me. Which tells me that you probably tell other people you use the same password for everything!

The moral is - as soon as the tech person leaves, change your password.

Wow, I seem to hear myself ranting now so I’ll close off. If I haven’t already made the point of this article really clear – here it is.

PROTECT YOUR DATA WITH A GOOD PASSWORD WHEN YOU ARE ON THE ROAD.

I’ll see you at the shows!