I had a funny/strange/frustrating
experience a while ago and I feel a need to share it. Janet and I were watching
a program about Internet security. It was especially concerning the difficulty people
have selecting and remembering passwords. It stressed the importance of having
strong passwords, and different ones for each resource used.
I have always found these types of programs very
informative, yet very frustrating because they me realize how 'insecure' I
really am online. I had one password for home use and one for work and they
were very similar. Wherever possible I used the same words over and over again.
The words were moderately strong according to a password rating system but they
probably lost any strength they had by reusing them.
When I went out on disability from
work, the password issue I had there of course was resolved since I was
automatically locked out of all work related programs. The password problem at
home continued however. Before I watched the program I was already somewhat
aware and a little concerned, but afterward I decided to take action in my own
quirky and ineffective way.
I changed my password on my Yahoo email
account to a rather strange combination of letters and numbers that made sense
to me. In any case, a week or so after making these changes with the hope that
my system would be more secure, I got hacked. It shouldn’t have been a major
issue, just a lot of spam email was sent out from my account. The major problem
though was that they changed my password and since the hackers were the last to
access my account, Yahoo did not recognize my computer. When I tried to
'convince' Yahoo that I was me, I forgot the answer to one of my security
questions and was totally blocked out of the account.
It was only after talking to my mom (who
is totally non-techie and did not understand a word of what I was talking
about) that she reminded me that my father was a Navy baby and was born
overseas and then was brought to Philadelphia. She gave me the answer
unknowingly, and resolved part of my problem.
Thanks to mom, I was able to answer
the security question, but then I had to come up with a new, stronger password
for Yahoo. The system would no longer accept a weak password. I entered
passwords that I used for years and that always were acceptable before but now
were not strong enough for the Yahoo password strength rating system. I began
getting very frustrated and used expletives in various languages, text
messaging curses and various symbols and numbers that indicated my displeasure.
I strung together almost 20 different types of characters, but nothing worked..
Janet heard me swearing under my breath and reminded me of the program we had
watched and of the free password generators it told of that were available on
the Internet. So I went online, found a couple that looked fairly reputable and
signed up on one. I copied the outlandish, impossible to remember series of
symbols from the generator and pasted it into the Yahoo password thingy but of
course it didn't work. So I signed up for another one, went through the whole
process again and still it didn't work.
At this point I was ready to throw the
computer across the room. I had been working on this, between the security
question snafu and now this password acceptance problem, for over four hours. I
was done! Janet kindly offered to help me out since I was at wits end. She
walked over, sat down, pulled the computer in front of herself and stared at it
for a moment. She then shut down Yahoo and restarted the program. She got
through all the security questions and arrived at the bleeping password screen.
She looked at it, entered something in, hit return and the system accepted it
immediately! Apparently, while I was desperately trying to get an acceptable
password, the Yahoo system timed out and did not notify me.
