Please, Use a Password Manager!

“Locked Padlock”by Twjst is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Troy Hunt posted an article on poor password protection practices (try saying that fives times fast), resulting from an analysis of a major corporate data breach. Some of the highlights were:

  • 93% of passwords are only 6 to 10 characters long
  • Two-thirds of passwords are reused across different services
  • Over a third of passwords can be found in a common dictionary

This is bad news for two reasons:

  1. Lots of passwords are easy to guess
  2. If an attacker guesses a password, chances are they can use the same password to access other services

The key is to use passwords that are long, complex, and difficult to guess. The challenge, of course, is that the harder a password is to guess, the harder it is for us to remember.

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Private Server Part 6: Public Access, Advanced Networking, and Advanced Security

Network

If you’ve been following the previous steps of this guide, you should have a secure, freshly updated installation of Ubuntu Server which you can access from another computer on the network using SSH. If that’s the case, you can safely unplug the keyboard and monitor from your server – you won’t be needing them. If you’re running your server behind a router (e.g., on a home network), chances are your server won’t be accessible from the outside world. This section explains how to make your server available to the public Internet so you can access it from home or while on the go.

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Private Server Part 4: Security and Remote Access

Now that you know how to use your shiny new Linux server, it’s time to make it accessible over the network. After all, the client-server model mentioned earlier doesn’t work very well if the client and the server are the same machine. This part of the guide explains how to set up your server to communicate safely with other devices.

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