Password Day!

They’re strange, they’re complex, they’re everywhere and we forget them far more than is absolutely healthy for us. No, we’re not talking about anniversaries (though sometimes we are! You’ll see what we mean) we’re talking about your passwords! We use them to secure the most private parts of our lives and to help protect our finances, our health records, or maybe just our emails. World Password Day reminds us of the importance of these little crypto-keys and the role they play in making sure we keep hold on our lives, identity thieves are everywhere, and these are your first digital line of defense.

Passwords have been around as long as people have been keeping secrets, though most people think of them as what we put into the box that follows Username and Email on all those websites. But long before that they served just as important a role, especially in espionage and secret societies. When you want to ensure that the person you were speaking to was the person sent by your organization, why, you’d ask them for the password! Secret Organizations like the Masons and other fraternal organizations also often asked for these before letting you through the door. Without a way to keep the secrets secret, it wouldn’t be much of a secret society would it?
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Nowadays such things are of far less concern, but digital protection has become absolutely vital to our day to day existence. Sometimes it’s just protecting our identity on our favorite web forum, and almost everyone has a Facebook account to protect. The problem is, where before you might need just a password or two, most people these days have dozens. Even worse, the protocol for these is often different, some requiring certain characters (numbers, Capitals, Symbols) and others denying the use. It makes having a universal password difficult, and security experts say that doing so is a terrible idea anyway.

Learn more about digital security here.