[MUSIC PLAYING]
Bobby Richter, privacy and security
tester here at Consumer Reports.
Boy, am I glad to see you, man.
Hey, what's going on?
Well, I've been hearing about this data breach and privacy
concerns all over the news.
Should I be worried?
Yeah, I think everybody should be at least a little concerned.
I was part of a data breach just recently.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I really try to stay vigilant and have strong passwords.
It's something I encourage everybody to do.
How would I know if I have a strong password then?
Well, why don't we play a game?
We can try to find out.
All right.
I like games.
Let me ask you some questions.
Sure.
What exactly is on your shirt there?
Oh, this is my dog, Boots.
Great.
Boots looks adorable.
[LAUGHTER]
Thanks.
All right.
When did you get Boots?
I got Boots--
2015.
OK.
And where did you get Boots from?
In Los Angeles.
All right.
So I'm going to take a guess at what your password might be.
Ready?
Mm-hmm.
iluvboots15-- is that about right?
That is very, very close.
It's not it, but it's scary that you almost got it.
Right.
Just imagine what would happen if I
had a little bit more time, if I had some tools, my laptop
around.
I might be able to use some of these techniques,
and then I would have it.
Hackers often can find all this personal information simply
by looking at your public social media feeds,
where you might post pictures of your dog,
write about your hometown, and other personal facts.
So how do I then strengthen my password?
Well, I have a technique, something a little bit
low tech.
I have some great cards here.
Pick three at random.
OK, what do you got here?
Well, we got stars, a car, and a boat.
OK, so I'm going to write these down.
And what we're going to try to do
is build a phrase using these.
Because you're going to wind up with a sentence
that's very long and has some randomness in it.
And so how about stars ride in cars and boats?
Oh, that's excellent.
You can see how long that password is.
Yeah.
How am I going to memorize that all the time?
Well, you try to build an image of that in your head.
You might actually imagine some actors
who are stars that ride cars and boats.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, all right.
So the key to this game is that you picked out
some cards that are random.
You have three random words.
And they make us a phrase that's very long
and passwords that are hard to crack.
Got it.
So randomness is probably the most key thing
to having a very strong password.
And length.
Are there any tools to be able to save these?
Yeah, password managers try to do this kind of thing
automatically.
What's a password manager?
A password manager is an application
on your laptop or your phone.
It helps you auto-generate passwords that
are long and random enough, but it also remembers them for you.
So are they the safest thing to do when
you restore your passwords?
I don't think anything is 100% safe,
but these techniques are the best
that we know about right now.
So the final thing we could talk about
is hints and security questions.
What do I need to know about this?
Well, they might ask you something
like, where did you grow up?
Oh, that's easy--
New York City.
All right.
Well, that answer is OK, but it's the truth.
And that's a problem.
Wait.
So you're telling me that I shouldn't
answer with the truth?
So then what should I do?
You should try to make something up
that you can remember, like San Francisco.
The same is true for password hints.
They might ask you--
they might just have another line
like that, that says give yourself
a hint for later in case you forget your password.
Yeah, I've seen this.
Yeah.
It's not a great idea to answer those things too truthfully
as well.
They're just giving someone more information than they need
to guess your password later.
I'm sorry, Boots.
I'm going to have to create some stronger passwords.
Good idea.
Be safe out there, Jack.
All right.
Thanks.