Nonsense, of course, but it helps illustrate a point: You will need a computer password today, maybe a half dozen or more — those secret sign-ins that serve as sentries for everything from Amazon shopping carts to work files to online bank accounts. Just when you have them all sorted out, along comes another “urgent” directive from the bank or IT department — time to reset those codes, for safety’s sake. And the latest lineup of log-ins you’ve concocted won’t last for long, either. Some might temporarily stay in your head, others are jotted on scraps of paper and stuffed in a wallet. A few might be taped to your computer monitor in plain view (or are those are from last year’s batch? Who can remember?).

Now, a study has concluded what lots of us have long suspected: Many of these irritating security measures are a waste of time. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the form of user effort and time expended.

“Most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit trade-off to users,” wrote its author, Cormac Herley, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research…”

The Boston Globe: Please do not change your password

Now before we begin if you want to use this feature you will need have Windows 7 Ultimate (or Enterprise) edition installed.

How do I encrypt a USB device?

Step 1. Insert your USB device you want to encrypt into your computer.

Step 2. Right click on the USB device in Windows Explorer and click on the “Turn on BitLocker…”

Step 3. Tick the “Use a password to unlock the drive” and then type the same password in the two password field’s and then click “Next”.

Note: As it says, you should try an make this password as complicated as possible with a combination of lower and upper case letter, numbers, spaces, and/or symbols.

Step 4. You are now FORCED to either save a file or print the recovery key for the device. This ensures that you have a copy of the 48 digit recovery in case you ever forget the password.

Note: You cannot save the recovery key to the device that you want to encrypt as this would be obviously be useless if you were to ever forget the unlock key.

Step 5. Once you have saved or printed the recovery key you will be able to continue by pressing “Next”.

Step 6. You are ready to encrypt the drive and all you have to do is click “Start Encrypting”.

Warning: This can take a LONG time especialy if you are encrypting a very large drive via a USB connection (My Western Digital 1tb USB external hard drive this process took about 12 hours).

First thing the encryption process does is install the BitLocker to Go reader application that will let you read the the device on down-level OS’s such as Windows XP and Vista.

Now the drive will start to encrypt.

Note: You can pause this encryption of this device and remove if it is taking longer than you thought but from this point you will need to enter the encryption key to access the data on the drive even though it is not fully encrypted. The other thing to note is that the drive will be read only until the encryption process has been completed.

Once completed click “Close” and the drive is now encrypted and ready to use.

The way to tell if a drive is encrypted in Windows Explorer is by the padlock symbol you can see on the drive icon (see belwo against “Nano (E:)”). An open grey padlock represents an unlocked drive and and closed gold padlock represents a locked drive.

How do I unlock and encrypt a USB device?

Step 1. Insert the USB device into a Windows 7 computer and you should be automatically prompted for a password to decrypt the device. Then just type the password in the password field and tick “Unlock”.

Note: If you tick the “Automatically unlock on this computer from now on” then the unlock password for this device will be stored on the registry of the computer so be very sure you trust this computer before using this option.

Step 2. Your DONE! the drive will now behave exactly as per normal.

Alternatively if the device is already connected and you need to unlock it, just right click on the drive in Windows Explorer and click the “Unlock Drive…” option. You will then be prompted with the same unlock drive dialogue box as seen above.

By Alan Burchill

Twitter at @alanburchill

Blog http://abskb.spaces.live.com

”A lot of the effort involved in establishing a secure computing environment focuses on technological solutions, from providing warnings about phishing attacks to blocking the propagation of botnets. But, as previous research has shown, security involves a significant human component. Nowhere is that more true than the item at the heart of basic security: the humble password. Here, our best practices—something that’s not in the dictionary or written down, differs for every account, etc.—ignores basic research, which shows that humans have a limited capacity to associate random text with, well, just about anything. A new survey of institutional IT users provides a glimpse into just how bad the password situation is, with less than five percent of users managing to use best practices.

What is perhaps most striking about the new study, which is being published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, is its background section, which details just how long we’ve been aware of the password problem. It cites a study of Unix passwords from 1979, which showed that about 30 percent of the passwords were four characters or less, and about 15 percent being words that appear in the dictionary. Fast forward to 2006, when a separate survey of 34,000 MySpace passwords revealed that the most common were ‘password1′, ‘abc123′, ‘myspace1′, and ‘password’.”

Click to read full article:  ARS Technica: 30 Years of Failure: The username/password combination