Cav's Place

For obvious reasons, this post will lack details, but yesterday I did something stupid and it prompted me to change my password on most sites. Now that was probably just a regular proxy server and the error meant that whatever I typed didn’t get anywhere anyway, plus that the fact that it wasn’t blocked by anything and the link was higher on the search result list than the actual site I was looking for, which is how I ended up there without realizing it, should quite clearly mean that it’s perfectly safe, but when I realized that I had submitted my password on an unknown site I just reacted.
Clearly, the accounts I use most frequently or see as particularly likely to cause significant problems if somehow taken over weren’t affected, as each of those have separate and more difficult passwords, and in some cases other security mechanisms as well, but many more might have been. Yes, that included some I hadn’t used in years, but I’m sure that there are plenty of others from that category that I couldn’t remember at all, so the total is certainly even higher.
It’s quite sad, and I certainly never thought I’d ever do something so stupid, but it was also probably about time to change passwords just about everywhere, especially since some sites were hacked relatively recently. That alone should have certainly prompted me to do this far more than an action that, as I said above, was probably completely harmless, but I guess the difference was that now I knew it was my mistake and there’d be nobody else to blame in case something happened, so I just reacted immediately.

Thinking of it, I guess I could have used this moment to perhaps also deactivate or delete some of those accounts I haven’t used in a very long time, if it is possible to do so, but I guess there will be another chance to do it. It could be my little project for this month, though the main one will be improving the security of the accounts I rarely use, so I won’t need to do something like this again in case one of them is or may end up being compromised, for whatever reason.
The problem with that, of course, is figuring out a way to come up with a system allowing me to create enough different passwords that’ll remain next to impossible for anyone else to guess, no matter how much said person will look up information about me, while still being extremely easy and intuitive for me to remember, even when I’ll need to quickly gain access to accounts not used in years. That’s not likely to prove easy and, as long as the passwords used are long enough and neither common nor particularly obvious, some may wonder what the point is, seeing as passwords can’t exactly guarantee security anymore, no matter how good they are… But if I can find some way to do something about it, it’d be about time.