Protect your login information

Internet security is important for all your online activity, regardless if it’s Dramatify, Facebook, Dropbox or your email. Below you find security measurements you should use for all your online activity.

At Dramatify, you can participate in as many different productions as you are invited to. Each of these can contain information and material that the producers want to keep under wraps until the production premieres. Therefore it is important that you are careful with your login information so that unauthorized persons can’t access your Dramatify account.

A few tips to keep your account safe

1. Make sure that the different devices you use to connect to Dramatify are password protected with a lock screen.
2. Pick strong passwords both for your devices and for Dramatify. Use the password selection tips below, or use a strong password generator.
3. Don’t use the same password for Dramatify as you do for online banking, social networking or email.
4. Don’t give your password to someone over the phone.
5. Try to change your most critical passwords on a regular basis.
6. It can be difficult to remember all the passwords for the different services you use, so consider using a multi-device password app like 1password or LastPass.

How to pick a secure password

1. Don’t use any personal identifiable information in your password like:
   • Name
   • User name
   • Birthday or birth year
   • Pet’s name
   • Spouse’s name
   • Child’s name
   • Hobby keyword
2. Don’t use any word that can be found in the dictionary as your full password
3. Try to use special characters such as non-alphabetic characters
4. Try to create passwords at with at least eight characters

Some ideas for easy to remember passwords

Some easy strategies to invent a strong password:
1) Think of a phrase, quote, or song verse and select the first character of each word to create a password.
“In the middle of a difficulty lies opportunity.” translates to “Itmoadlo.”

2) Passwords are often case sensitive and here we’ve used a capital “I” just like the start of the sentence.
Vowels can be replaced with numbers to add entropy: “Itmoadlo.” translates to “1tm0adl0.”

3) Punctuation is a good way to add entropy to your passwords as well as a little length. Note the use of the period punctuation mark in the password above.

It is important to realise that the above strategy results in a password that is better than average but can still be guessed in time using today’s powerful computers. The key is to establish your own unique password creation pattern and ensure the password is of sufficient length. Password length is the most important factor in creating passwords.

How to add length and in turn strength to your passwords

Create a unique string that you can prefix or append to your passwords such as:
prefix string + password = stronger password
tdr0cks! + itm0adl0. = tdr0cks!itm0adl0.
tdr0cks! + torvt11. = tdr0cks!torvt11.

The prefix string can be the same for all your passwords thus making it easier to remember. However the core password must be different for each website, application, or category. Also the prefix string must not be a single character as its common practice to brute force passwords using ! or 1 as the first or last character.

Use common but unrelated words

If the above strategies still look too cumbersome one can simply think of 4 or 5 unrelated yet common words and concatenate them together to create their passwords.
princess + toast + finance + captain = princesstoastfinancecaptain
The key to this common word strategy is picking unrelated words and building a sufficiently long password. It’s the length that really increases the password strength. Lastly it is recommended that these strategies be combined with the use of a password vault application to securely store your passwords.

Thanks to Don deBolt at Total Defense for background and facts to this post.