Spare me the tyranny of the internet p@$$w0rd!

As we’re told our computer security is now too easy to hack, a cry from the keyboard of a writer who’s forever locking herself out

REMEMBER how, as a child, you would try to join in on a playground game only to be told — usually by the girl with the flicky blonde hair and perfect teeth — that of course you could . . . if you could tell her the password?

I was never cool enough to be given the secret, so I spent most of my school days with my nose pressed up against the windowpane of life, desperately wishing I could somehow divine whichever magical catchphrase would get me out of social Siberia.

I had assumed that as a grown-up I would be spared such tiresome nonsense. But just my luck: the internet came along, and now passwords are everywhere.

They have become the bane of my life. I seem to spend all my time either desperately trying to remember the damn things, or if failing to do so, re- setting them — and forcing my brain to come up with new ones that I know, inevitably, will also, in due course, be forgotten. And it’s only going to get worse. This weekend cyber chiefs issued a red alert, encouraging the nation’s web users to upgrade their online security after revealing millions of us use passwords that are as basic as ‘123456’ or ‘password’.

According to the Government’s cyber and security organisation GCHQ, nearly one in two of us can expect to have money stolen online by 2021 — and it’s all because we don’t take our passwords seriously enough.

So if you’re one of the millions of online users whose password is simply ‘qwerty’ (the first five letters on the top row of your keyboard), or your birthday backwards, then you had better forget about enjoying the rest of your Bank holiday weekend — and get yourself to password rehab, pronto.

Who would have thought the stuff of playground feuds and spy stories would one day become an everyday necessity? Because there can be no doubt we are all tyrannised by the password — so much so you practically need one to take your morning shower.

SUCCESS in the modern internet age — from turning on the heating and renewing a parking permit to checking your bills — rests on the ability to select the correct username/password combination. Fail, and you cannot function.

There are few things more infuriating than that annoying red ‘error’ message telling you that you have typed in the wrong user/password combination.

In me it brings on anger, of course, but also an overwhelming sense of helpless of ness followed by rising panic, which makes it even less likely that I will eventually get it right.

Add the fact that so many of these wretched passwords have to be typed into smartphones — which, thanks to a uniquely devilish combination of tiny font sizes and fiddly keypads means you need thumbs the size of a toddler’s — and barely a day seems to pass without being locked out of one vital account or another.

Last week, for example, I got shut out of my work emails. I didn’t notice immediately.

Only when I became conscious of a blissfully relaxed frame of mind did I realise that it had been ages since anyone had pestered me by email.

It took the best part of a morning to re- set the thing, not least because I had to download a new App from the App Store, which in turn meant remembering my login for the App Store . . . which I had recently changed, following an attempted unauthorised log-in.

And because I was so anxious to please the computery bar thing that tells you whether your new password is ‘strong’ or ‘weak’, I had used an exclamation mark instead of an ‘i’.

Which I had completely forgotten about. So that was exhausting.

And it’s not just stupid old analogue me who gets this sort of stuff wrong.

My children, who are allegedly tech-savvy teens, forget their logins all the time. My daughter is currently using an ancient ‘brick’ phone because she can’t remember which Apple ID she used to sign into her iPhone, and now the damn thing is locked until 2022, or until I can face queuing for four hours at the criminally misnomered Apple Genius Bar for ‘tech support’.

Still, I suppose it could be worse: there was that three-year-old the other week who locked his father out of his iPad for 48 and a half years.

Technology is pigheaded that way: if the keystrokes don’t match up, there’s no hope of redemption. It’s just ‘computer says no’.

The trouble is human being are not computers, designed to be able to store complex alphanumeric sequences in our brains and pluck them out of our memory banks at a moment’s notice. Which is why so many of us, in a desperate effort to avoid the immense inconvenience of being locked out of the Ocado shop, prefer to keep it simple — even if it does run counter to all official advice.

Birthdays, pets, children, relative’s names — all form the basis of the passwords we use on a daily basis.

Okay, we reason, the dog’s name followed by your house number might not be the most cryptic of codes, but at least it’s something you’ll remember.

That was probably Mark Zuckerberg’s excuse when, in 2016, hackers revealed that his password was, quite simply, ‘dadada’ (he and his wife had just had a child, and one presumes those were its first words).

Still, it’s strangely encouraging to know that even the founder of Facebook, one of the world’s most powerful and pernicious social media platforms, can make such a schoolboy error.

So, how can you beat the hackers without also locking yourself out? Well, there are things called password managers, apps that keep track of all your passwords — except they also require passwords, which must be fiendishly complex, since anyone who does successfully hack their way in will have access to everything.

There’S

also that Keychain thing on Apple smartphones, iPads and MacBooks, which is supposed to look after your passwords, but which I don’t trust, let alone understand.

You could simply write them down and keep them somewhere safe. This is not a bad idea, since most cyber-hackers are liable to be based somewhere east of the Ural mountains, and therefore unlikely to be rifling through your handbag or desk drawers.

It also has the advantage that, should you meet with a fatal accident on your way home from the shops, your nearest and dearest will at least be able to cancel your Netflix subscription and gain access to your overdraft without — irony of ironies — hiring a team of cyber-hackers.

This is what the wife of Gerald Cotten, Canada’s biggest cryptocurrency magnate, has had to do.

Cotten passed away suddenly at the end of last year and has left over £145 million of his clients’ money trapped in cyberspace until and unless someone can crack his password. So far no one has. Most people I know have a method. One friend, for example, bases his passwords on second division football players of the eighties.

Another uses obscure 18thcentury Whig politicians; another still draws inspiration from the operas of richard Wagner.

All rather more prosaic than my own method, based on types of French patisserie. One way of ensuring I never run out of cake.