Poor Man Survival
Self Reliance tools
for independent minded people…
ISSN 2161-5543
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
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Tips to Help You Stay Cybersafe on Your Holiday Travels-Definitive
Guide to Passwords
We’re teaming up with the Department of Homeland Security to help you
stay “cybersafe” this holiday season.
The holidays are
right around the corner, which for many of us means traveling to celebrate
with friends and family. Whether you are just traveling for a weekend away to
see the grandkids or going on a long winter vacation overseas, it is
important to be cyber secure. Travelers are often easy prey for hackers as
they are forced to rely on public Wi-Fi or computers and may need to leave
their electronic devices unattended in hotel rooms or in-transit. Follow
these simple steps before and during your journey to help stay protected the
next time you’re away from home. |
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Before
You Leave:
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Along with
confirming your itinerary and packing, add these to-dos to your checklist:
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Be mindful of your Internet activity and how you can
protect your privacy as well as your device:
While
You’re Away
The Definitive Guide to
Passwords
Many of the secure services that
allow us to feel comfortable using digital technology to conduct important
business, from signing in to our computers and sending email to encrypting
and hiding sensitive data, require that we remember a password.
These secret words, phrases or
strings of gibberish often provide the first, and sometimes the only, barrier
between your information and anyone who might want to read, copy, modify or
destroy it without your permission.
There are many ways in which someone
could learn your passwords, but you can defend against most of them by
applying a few specific tactics and by using a secure password database tool,
such as KeePassX.
What
You Can Learn From This Guide
Introduction
to Passwords
Let’s start with a story…
Selecting
and Maintaining Secure Passwords
In general, when you want to protect
something, you lock it up with a key.
Houses, cars and bicycle locks all
have physical keys; protected files have encryption keys; bank cards have PIN
numbers; and email accounts have passwords.
All of these keys, physical and
electronic, have one thing in common: they open their respective locks just
as effectively in the hands of somebody else.
You can install advanced firewalls,
secure email accounts, and encrypted disks, but if your password is weak, or
if you allow it to fall into the wrong hands, they will not do you much good.
Elements
of a Strong Password
A password should be difficult for a
computer program to guess.
A password should be difficult for
others to figure out.
A password should be chosen so as to
minimise damage if someone does learn it.
Remembering
and Recording Secure Passwords
Looking over the list of suggestions
above, you might wonder how anyone without a photographic memory could
possibly keep track of passwords that are this long, complex and meaningless
without writing them down.
The importance of using a different
password for each account makes this even more difficult. There are a few
tricks, however, that might help you create passwords that are easy to
remember but extremely difficult to guess, even for a clever person using
advanced 'password cracking' software.
You also have the option of recording
your passwords using a tool like KeePassX that was created specifically for this purpose.
Remembering
Secure Passwords
It is important to use different
types of characters when choosing a password. This can be done in various
ways:
Any of these methods can help you
increase the complexity of an otherwise simple password, which may allow you
to choose one that is secure without having to give up entirely on the idea
of memorizing it.
Some of the more common substitutions
(such as the use of a zero instead of an 'o' or the '@' symbol in place of an
'a') were long-ago incorporated into password-cracking tools, but they are
still a good idea.
They increase the amount of time that
such tools would require to learn a password and, in the more common
situations where tools of this sort cannot be used, they help prevent lucky
guesses.
Passwords can also take advantage of
more traditional mnemonic devices, such as the use of acronyms. This allows
long phrases to be turned into complex, seemingly-random words:
These are just a few examples to help
you come up with your own method of encoding words and phrases to make them simultaneously
complex and memorable.
A little effort to make the password
more complex goes a very long way. Increasing the length of a password even
just by a few characters, or by adding numbers or special characters, makes
it much more difficult to crack.
For demonstrative purposes, the table
below shows how much longer it may take a hacker to break a list of
progressively more complex passwords by trying different combinations of the
password one after another.
Of course, the time it would take to
crack any of the above passwords would vary widely depending on the nature of
the attack, and the resources available to the attacker.
Moreover, new methods to crack
passwords are constantly being devised. All the same, the table does
demonstrate that passwords become vastly more difficult to break by simply
varying characters and using two words or, even better, a short phrase.
The table above is based on Passfault's calculations. Passfault is one of a number of websites which
allow you to test the strength of your passwords. However, while such
resources are good for demonstrating the relative efficiency of different
types of passwords, you should avoid introducing your actual passwords into
these sites.
Recording
Passwords Securely
While a little creativity may allow
you to remember all of your passwords, the need to change those passwords
periodically means that you might quickly run out of creativity.
As an alternative, you can generate
random, secure passwords for most of your accounts and simply give up on the
idea of remembering them all. Instead, you can record them in a portable,
encrypted secure password database, such as KeePassX.
Of course, if you use this method, it
becomes especially important that you create and remember a very secure
password for KeePassX, or whatever tool you choose.
Whenever you need to enter a password
for a specific account, you can look it up using only your master password,
which makes it much easier to follow all of the suggestions above.
KeePassX is portable, as well, which
means that you can put the database on a USB memory stick in case you need to
look up a password while you are away from your primary computer.
Although it is probably the best
option for anybody who has to maintain a large number of accounts, there are
a few drawbacks to this method.
First, if you lose or accidentally
delete your only copy of a password database, you will no longer have access
to any of the accounts for which it contained passwords. This makes it
extremely important that you backup your KeePassX database. Fortunately, the
fact that your database is encrypted means that you don't have to panic if
you lose a USB memory stick or a backup drive containing a copy of it.
The second major drawback could be
even more important. If you forget your KeePassX master password, there is no
way to recover it or the contents of the database. So, be sure to choose a
master password that is both secure and memorable!
The strength of this method may, in
certain situations, become its weakness.
If somebody forces you to give away
your KeePassX database master password, they will gain access to all of the
passwords stored in the KeePassX database. If this is a situation you may
face, you could treat your KeePassX database as a sensitive file, and protect
it as we describe in our guide How
to protect the sensitive files on your computer. You can also
create a separate KeePassX database to contain passwords protecting more
sensitive information and take extra precautions with that database.
This article was
originally published by Security-in-a-Box and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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Useful Resources Everyone Can Use
Clever Uses for Aluminum Foil
·
Sharpen scissors-hone dull scissors by folding a
piece of foil into quarters and cutting through it several times.
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Remove rust by crumpling foil into a wad and
using it to scrub rust from car chrome or household items – it is softer than
steel, so it won’t scratch the surface.
·
Make a funnel-fold a sheet twice on a diagonal
to create a cone, then cut the tip to create a small hole. Use your makeshift funnel to transfer liquids
into jars with narrow openings.
·
Speed up ironing by placing a layer of foil
under your ironing-board cover. Because
aluminum reflects heat, it will help with pressing out wrinkles.
·
Guard against paint drips-ready to paint but you
have no tape for masking? Foil can be
used before you start to wrap doorknobs, dresser handles and other
hardware…also use it to line roller pans for easier clean up.
A Few More Clever Solutions...
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How a single mom can create
multiple income streams Read
more.
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An Easy Budgeting
Trick
If you hate meticulously tracking every minor expense, then this easy trick just might be the thing that can help you stick with your budget.
If you hate meticulously tracking every minor expense, then this easy trick just might be the thing that can help you stick with your budget.
Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
Additional
Resources
The Anatomy of a Breakdown
The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster
Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival
Homemade wood
stove
Heat and
Electricity Cost Cutting 101
Save more of your hard-earned cash by using these 7 ways to save on your electric bill.
Save more of your hard-earned cash by using these 7 ways to save on your electric bill.
Arm Up System-Defense Without Regulation
PM’s Guide to Home Defense
It is a crazy world out there with plenty of violence and everyone knows you that under most circumstances, police usually arrive after the fact. Your rights to defend yourself are often under attack, even for non-lethal self-defense tools…Includes book and 3 bonus CD ROMS
http://www.bonanza.com/listings/Guide-to-Home-Defense-Arm-Up-System-Defense-W-out-Regulation-Bonuses/370808566
PM’s Guide to Home Defense
It is a crazy world out there with plenty of violence and everyone knows you that under most circumstances, police usually arrive after the fact. Your rights to defend yourself are often under attack, even for non-lethal self-defense tools…Includes book and 3 bonus CD ROMS
http://www.bonanza.com/listings/Guide-to-Home-Defense-Arm-Up-System-Defense-W-out-Regulation-Bonuses/370808566
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