Keep it safe: Sharing with Surevine. Week 4 – Pins

Welcome to our fourth instalment in a series of blogs we are publishing each week, all under the title “Keep it safe: Sharing with Surevine”.

In our first post we introduced the series, with our theme of Passwords, and focussed on Password Storage.

In week 2 we took it one step further, and talked about Password Complexity.

Last week was Beyond Passwords and dealt with 2FA.

And this week we have…

Phone PINs

The phone is an important part of a good login process (you can see what we think good is here), and so you need to protect it too.

It is very important for many reasons to set a PIN lock on your phone and choose a PIN that is not “1234”.

Also, if you turn on the “wipe after x attempts” feature, it means if your phone does ever get stolen/lost it is highly unlikely anyone will be able to get anything out of it.

After all this, if we get a text message from you asking us to wire you some money because you’re on holiday and lost your wallet, we are not going to be impressed. 

In summary… why so many different passwords?

No matter how complicated it is, if your password is stored/transmitted with weak encryption, someone can work out what it is. To address this risk we suggest you change your passwords often (at least every 6 months) and use a different password everywhere.

With a password manager it is easy to see how old your passwords are and if you generate a random password for every new site, then you will have no duplicates.

If you use the same password everywhere, when it is discovered you’re in a race with the hackers to see who gets to what first. The chances are the first thing you’ll know about your password being known is when something bad has happened and by then, probably lots of bad things have already happened. You already lost the race while you were asleep!

Be sure to check in next week when we move on from Passwords, and enter into the world of Anti-Malware…