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A hard lesson in passwords learned early

by Tris Hussey on February 19th, 2007

We all know how important making secure password is, and if we all know about keeping them secret but sometimes we don’t learn the lesson early enough.  My daughter had an experience this weekend that really drives home the importance of keeping your password secret.

My daughter is really into the online community WebKins.  If you know know the WebKins this is a community where you buy a small stuffed animal, and then connect it with the website.  On the website you earn virtual dollars to buy your virtual pad, food and other nice things like couches and beds. Of course, your whole account is controlled by a username and password.  Well, this Saturday my daughter log into her account and found that almost all her money was gone and a lot of horror the furniture from her virtual house.  This was a very traumatic experience for her shoes very upset she didn’t know how this is happened.  We suspect that at one friend who knew her password gave it to a less reliable friend who then used it to gain access to her account.

As traumatic as this was, both Lorraine and I reminded her how important it wise to keep her password secret, and this was a really good lesson to learn early in life. 

So let this be a reminder to you, make the good passwords (and in fact my daughter makes excellent passwords) and keep them secret.  My daughter’s loss was virtual, but your loss could be a real and expensive.

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