This morning I was going through my email, intending to blog something right afterward. An hour later, just getting done with email – I wanted to observe some common courtesies and take care of some business, after all – and now I have to go get ready for work. So of course, I’m going to go ahead and blog something quick-like because it was part of my email misadventures this morning.

I have been known to play this one particular MMORPG (game) on occasion. Since I read all the headers in my spam folder before emptying it every morning, I noticed that I got an email in my spam folder that claimed to be about this game from the game’s provider. So I looked at it, and I would have to say that it wasn’t the worst impersonation I have ever seen, and probably a better one than most; they had links in the email that gave real addresses to the real site in the text and when you hovered over them, but I had to be skeptical because it sounded too fishy. They were going to inactivate my account if I didn’t click on the link? I don’t know about that!

So I opened a new tab and went over to their site while I had the game loading in the background. I figured I would log in just to make sure my account wasn’t compromised; thankfully it was not. I went over their page about suspicious emails, and I learned that they had started using some new security technologies, one of which I decided to implement.

Ever since Wired magazine published an article a few months back about the death of the password, I have been keeping my mind on my security. I’m just as guilty as anyone else for being lazy – after all, who wants to remember a bajillion passwords? But I have started implementing some new password strategies, and my two favorites are the passphrase and the mobile two-step authentication. The passphrase involves using a string of words for a longer password, while the mobile two-step deal involves using a number generator app on your phone to provide a secondary passcode to an account which you have linked to the app whenever you’re logging in from an unknown computer. Often you get the choice to remember computers, so that on your home computer and your tablet and whatnot you don’t have to worry about authenticating it every time. But if someone tries to log on from the Ukraine? Surprise, sucka! You don’t have my phone.

I wanted a lovely infographic to go with this post, and I have no idea how to make one so I lifted one from Lifehacker and I will credit the article below. It’s worth reading, as well as all of the linked articles. You really can’t be too safe when it comes to password security; after all, you’re probably protecting your bank accounts and your entire wealth of personal information with them. If it’s inconvenient, it’s probably safer and more worthwhile.

Thanks to Lifehacker! I got this from http://lifehacker.com/5876541/use-this-infographic-to-pick-a-good-strong-password