The Password Bunker

Your life is more digital than ever!  Your identity is indicated by a set of numbers and letters everywhere and each platform or organization identifies you by a different customer number/ account number / email id  or mobile number. The best of the face recognition softwares is not half as good as the friendly neighbour-hood banker or the grocer .

You need to identify yourself to your banker / trader / govt agent or to a dumb system ,at all times through a simple set of username and passwords. I wonder if there is anyone reading this who has not been affected by password issues.

As a teacher, it could have been a question paper or a result sheet that you had been locked out of, resulting in doing it all over again.

As a corporate worker you might have locked some tender related documents and forgotten the key.

It could have been your online banking account that got disabled after three unsuccessful tries . Of late it is the cryptocurrency making news as people lose millions of dollars for forgetting their passwords. A heavy price indeed.

Youngsters have already reconciled to the idea of a passwords controlled digital life be it work or leisure.

Some people of my age, sixty plus, think they can run away from these problems. I am also learning how some are successfully keeping themselves away from the complexities of the binary world. To them , all I can say is that by avoiding technology, they are also depriving themselves of the benefits that digital life brings. Anyway, to each his/ her own.

What prompted me to write the post was a rather tragic set of events. A friend who had passed away, had left all his financial dealings recorded in an excel spreadsheet and had locked it right and proper with passwords. Now even after an year , the family members are unable to access the contents. Then there was another who , probably, did not maintain a record of his dealings and the family members came to know of a transaction only when an affected party told them. Under such circumstances , obviously any money owed to the diseased will be forgotten gleefully  and any money that he owed will be recovered from his kin.

There are also cases where someone has maintained his financial records including passwords very meticulously and the same  falling into wrong hands , leading to a catastrophic effect. A stolen smartphone or a laptop can lead to a financial ruin.

So, on one hand, one needs to maintain a record of all important information including passwords and the same has to be kept protected from fraudsters. On the other hand the information has to be readily available to him  or his next of kin after he is gone.

It is actually not just about passwords, but also about making a place to simply store all the other information for each account – account numbers, phone, expiration dates, even listings that have almost nothing to do with the Web.

Googling over the issue of how best information database can be built and  maintained , I came across this book “Password Bunker” by Paula Capstan. 

Essentially it says , store the details systematically on an Excel Sheet and password protect that sheet.

The idea has been expanded to a complete book of 140 pages. It costs Rs 813/- for a paperback and free for kindle-unlimited subscribers. 

It is an ELI5  book. For the not so young, ELI5 , on the net, stands for Explain Like I am 5. It starts with instructions like click means click the mouse once and double-click means click it twice in quick succession.

There are also many useful insights into how a novice makes up his passwords and how hackers exploit this knowledge. There are lots of practical tips on how to keep the information available and yet keep it safe from prying eyes. One such tip says,” take print outs for short journeys , but keep the username and password on separate sheets. password is of no use without the knowledge of username. That’s why in the Linux world, an username is considered as confidential as the password.

If your password is blue1234 , store it as b4321 and decode it again when you want to use. Bottom-line is that everyone has to find his own method to remember the password, may be  with a small hint noted  down; but something better than asking your spouse ,”hey, what’s my password?” 

As I see it, the book is not worth buying for 813/- but definitely worth going through if you are a subscriber to kindle unlimited. Whatever, the idea of storing information of personal identities on the web , securely , is worth pondering over.

So much for use of a spreadsheet for keeping a record of important information. 

I ran a survey on a telegram group of my age group and the results are as shown.

As can be seen only one vote for an electronic spreadsheet and almost 50% for maintaining a physical diary or note book.

To my pleasant surprise , on Amazon ,I just saw the kind of customized notebooks for the pen and note book types.. 

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Discrete password journal lets you store your important internet passwords in one convenient place!

Measuring at 6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm), this password keeper has spaces to record the website name, username, password, and notes

Stop writing your passwords down on sticky notes everywhere

Premium matte-finish cover design

Password Keeper with more than 100 pages

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I like it ! A password keeper with more than 100 pages ! The times we live in !