Curseword

The curse on all computer users is the password – that necessary evil that admits us to the delights of cyber-space. Passwords have descended upon us with a vengeance, testing our memory, mocking us with their quirky demands, and destroying our confidence in human kindness and goodness. I have over twenty passwords for computers, e-mail accounts, banking, shopping, gaming, movies, professional memberships and WIFI connections. To maintain their viability and uniqueness, I combine something wickedly personal with a string of at least 8 uppercase and lower case characters that includes at minimum one number and one special character. “EightlcUC1$” fits the criteria.

We want our passwords to express our personality, recall a fond memory, or seek revenge on an evil-doer with made-up jargon that remains firmly planted in our memory until the moment we need it. The selection process is akin to painting a self-portrait expressing something unforgettable about ourselves in letters and symbols.  The password exists for our security, but we are warned not to use dates, pet names or proper names of persons, and never, ever reuse the same password twice. What is left is often a combination of junk that at one time had meaning but now cannot be recalled because of its ridiculousness. As long as you can remember your User ID, a password can be changed with an e-mail code to reset it, if you can type it twice without error. Then you must not only remember another password, but to forget your previous, perfectly good one.

In his New York Times article (November 2014), Ian Urbina relates a story of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the world’s largest financial companies, following the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center. The company lost 653 employees in the disaster, all computer hardware, as well as backup systems located below the second tower. The chief executive, Howard Lutnick, knew that the passwords safeguarding company’s financial transactions were also lost and had to be recovered in order to continue before business could resume. Two days after the tragedy, Microsoft dispatched 30 computer experts to an off-site location to help the company recover the passwords. The experts realized that they needed employees’ personal data to generate the lost passwords. They called each asking for family names, birthdates, hometowns, anniversary dates, and pet names, and within two days, the passwords had been recovered. The bad news is that hackers could have done the same thing.

There are many security tips published on how to choose a password, but where is the fun if we cannot make up a word that fits our feeling at the moment, and that embeds itself in our memory? The objective is to create many such passwords that they reflect our personality, retain their uniqueness and are memorable. The perfect password captures some unique personal quality and yet protects us.  A computer joke is to use the word “Incorrect” as your password so when the annoying pop-up screen appears, it will tell you that your password is “Incorrect.” Until that perfect word blows in on the west wind, ‘Youarenotgoingtorememberthisanywaysowhatthehell8!’ is good enough for me.