World Password Day

There can be little denying that unlike previous generations of girlguides and scouts, computer and smartphone use is front and centre in their social lives whoever future usage may be shaped by 16 and under social media polices being considered by the U.K. Government and others in Europe.

From that it's entirely understandable that both wings of Scouting in the U.K. do talk about and have in their programs for children sections covering the Internet and Computer usage looking at bothe opportunities the internet provides and awareness of the risks we all face.

May 7th was World Password Day which was used by some to discuss and practise setting strong passwords in Scouts.

In the earlier days of the internet which I dare say some of us recall keeping our accounts such as email accounts and that of any sites we used was focussed on a single strong password that had upper and lower case characters, numbers and punctuation not just "password" or "123456".

Modern thinking around online security has changed as computer programs used by people who want access to accounts to exploit for fraud and such like automatically run though thousands of combinations to the belief that a a specific pass though you have created is harder to break provided it has at least several words in it.

The choice of suitably hard to crack ones is the kind of thing that would be discussed and how frequent we should change them.