Complex UserNames...Helpful???

mygoodness

Does a complex username add to account security, or, will any thing do, such as my email addy…which, sadly, is well known on the web.

Seems like a hacker would need both UN and PW to access an account, so, a complex UN would be beneficial. Conversely, an email addy would be a detriment.

But, since there's no emphasis on a complex UserName, perhaps it makes no difference....thoughts?? Thanks.

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XIII

Unique usernames might help increase your privacy (but not so much your security?).

If you use the same email address as your username everywhere it's easier to make a profile on you.

Dave_1P

Hello @mygoodness! 👋

Thanks for the question! Using a unique username, or email address, can help protect you from the following:

1. From websites correlating your identity between accounts. If you use the same username or email address on two different websites, and those websites are breached or sell your data, then someone can discover that you're the same person on each site.
2. From breaches where you might be using the same username, email address and password on multiple websites. If one website is breached then it's very easy for an attacker to use the same credentials to try to login to other websites.

Now, hopefully you're already using a unique password for every website by generating and storing those passwords in 1Password so the second concern shouldn't be an issue for you: Use the password generator to change and strengthen your passwords

For the first concern there is benefit to using unique usernames and email addresses for different websites. 1Password can help you do this with the masked email alias feature: Use 1Password to create and manage Masked Emails in Fastmail

Using a complex username that you reuse across various websites wouldn't really do much that I can think of. As XIII said, what matters more here is a unique username or email address.

I hope that helps! 🙂

-Dave

poespas

Adding to it, what makes it useful for a password to be unique and complex is because of hashing, which is the process of a one-way 'secret-making' way of password storing, websites do this to make sure they don't just save your password in plain text, whenever a breach happens a intrudor will need to individually try to crack these accounts passwords one by one.

Your username and/or email are stored in plain text in databases, which is what allows them to display your username on your profile and/or send newsletters. The only way it may benefit you is, as mentioned above, not to link your same username (and also passwords in that case) between accounts between other websites.

Dave_1P

Thanks for the contribution @poespas! 🙂

-Dave