Password theft or abuse are often the root of cyberbullying and digital abuses. Passwords are frequently too easy to guess, hard to remember, stored on a device or shared with others.
WiredSafety.org’s studies have shown that most teens share their password with
at least one other person (typically their boyfriend/girlfriend or best friend).
And they rarely use different passwords for different sites or purposes, which
means once someone has it for one network, they have it for all networks.
They need to be reminded that giving your password out is like
locking your door, but giving someone the key and burglar alarm code. It’s not
very smart. Teach the teens you work
with to make it a hard and fast rule never to share their passwords.
Too many computer and account intrusions arise just because the
password was easy to guess (such as the word “password,” or “12345”) or because
it was one of the “20 questions” used to come up with most passwords (such as
our pet’s name, our middle name, the street we live on, birthdate or
anniversary, the year we graduated or will graduate high school, favorite
sports team or rock star).
There are usually three different levels of passwords. Easy (or
low risk of loss), medium (a higher level of risk of loss) and very hard (for
financial accounts, health information and other very sensitive accounts or
data). Think of them as Goldilock’s passwords, you want them not too easy, not
too hard but just right.
Simple passwords that are easy to remember, but not
one of the easy to guess choices, are fine for free accounts, such as your
local news site or networks that give you free accounts and don’t contain
anything that you couldn’t recreate easily.
Medium levels are for your social
networking accounts and other accounts that are important but that could be
retrieved if accessed. (Facebook offers a device authentication security
feature, where you can verify your devices to prevent others from accessing
your account for other devices. This is an easy way to help secure your
Facebook accounts.)
Hard passwords have to be the most secure, and often have
to include upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers. These are hard to
remember, though, and often stored in text files or on PostIt notes stuck to
the computer monitor. That makes them very vulnerable to being accessed by
others.
Suggest that your teens come up with a special sentence for each
instance of high security password customized for each network or account. A
sentence starts with a capital letter, contains lower case letters and ends
with punctuation (a symbol). As long as the sentence also includes a number, it
meets the high security requirements. If you include something that you use to
describe the network of account (i.e. “FB” for your Facebook account), these
are also customized for each account and even harder to guess.
