Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's take a look at creating secure passwords for your Mac for things other
than online passwords.
So last week I released a new short book available in iBooks and on Amazon called The Practical
Guide To Mac Security.
This is one of the tips that I give in that book.
Say you are on the web and you want to create a new password for something you are doing.
So say I'm setting up a Facebook account for the first time.
I click in the password field and I see that Safari suggests a password.
I should use a password either from a Safari suggestion or another third party app like
1Password or LastPass because a randomly generated password is going to be much more secure than
anything I could think up.
So I can do that.
But what if I have to create a password for something that is not on the web.
That's in an app or maybe in the real world not even on my Mac.
Well on your Mac those passwords are stored on your Keychain.
You don't ever actually have to access the Keychain directly because you've got Safari
doing that for you.
But you can go to an app that you have on your Mac called Keychain Access.
I'm going to search for it basically by using Spotlight here and run it.
You can see I could find it here in my Application folder, I believe it is in the Utilities subfolder,
but it is just easier to search for it like this.
I've got all sorts of things in here that Safari has saved as well as things other apps
and different things have saved that used Keychain.
But what if I want to use this to create something that isn't on my computer or is in an app
that is not using Keychain.
Go to File, New Password Item, and create a new password here.
Now the cool thing is that I can actually store this in my Keychain.
Since I only have access to my Keychain when I'm logged into my Mac with my password this
is secure.
So I can just create something here and create a password for it.
But the best part of this is that I can just hit this little key button here and bring
up the password assistant and generate a random secure password.
So the password assistant has a lot of different controls.
You can set a type of password like something memorable.
Something that is random but it has bits in it that will help your remember it.
This is good for something where you can't use a reminder or something very easily.
You have to memorize it.
But you can also go to something like just some random Letters and Numbers, Numbers Only
which is useful say if you have to generate a pin for your ATM card you can use this of
course.
It only goes to eight characters because anything less really isn't that secure.
But you can take the first four or something like that.
At least they are randomly generated.
You can go through all of these.
It will tell you the quality of the password depending upon the length and what you have
selected.
Once you have this you can easily copy and paste.
Now if you want more suggestions you can click here and you can see it gives you a whole
list of them.
For instance if I want to use something memorable and for some reason I didn't like that I could
just click here and choose the second one instead.
So let's create one here.
I'm going to create something, let's say my ATM pin.
I'm just going to call it that.
I'm going to generate a Numbers Only password and just take the first four there.
Then what will happen is that it will automatically place it here in the password field and I
can now add it, I have to give it an account name so I will just call it My Bank, Add.
You can see it adds it in here under the Passwords category here.
Under login means that I have to be logged to be able to access this.
So I can always go in here, open this up, click Show Password, and it is going to ask
me to enter in my login password.
Then I can see my ATM pin.
So it is a good way to store these things.
Especially if you need to generate something randomly and then make sure you have it somewhere
secure in case you forget it.
Check out my book, The Practical Guide To Mac Security.
It has all sorts of good information about things like this.
About different ways to protect your online accounts and your Mac with good passwords,
protecting yourself from malware, protecting yourself from scams and tricks, and backing
up you Mac and protecting it from other physical disasters.
All sorts of other miscellaneous questions that people have about Mac security.
It is only $2.99 in the iBooks store from Apple or also the Amazon store for Kindle.