Protect Your Data!
Has your password been breached?
In case you hadn’t heard, last week, almost 800 million email addresses and passwords, gathered from a series of website breaches across the internet, were dumped online for all to see. Pretty much anyone who has used the internet since 2009 could be affected. You can read more about it here.
Most of us are or have been guilty of using the same password for numerous websites. My business passwords are locked up tight, but I’ll hold my hand up to being a bit lazy with passwords for my personal email address despite knowing the risks. But that ends today. It’s time we all got smarter about our online data.
Our data is our IDENTITY. In the wrong hands it can be used to manipulate outcomes, to hold us to ransom, and to make life pretty damn miserable. What we put out there online is there FOREVER, whether it’s your password for your Amazon account, or the pictures and comments you post on Facebook. It’s all data and we need to protect it, so let’s all make a promise to stop using that same old familiar password. If you can remember it, you can bet it won’t take a hack-bot long to figure it out either.
Luckily there are some clever password storage vaults out there that can help with this. One is LastPass and another is 1Password There are many other digital vaults out there – you need to do the research on what works best for you.
Digital vaults store your new hacker-thwarting passwords so you only have to remember the password to your digital vault. When you enter your email address and password into a website, the digital vault makes a note of it and stores it ready to autofill the email address and password field the next time you visit that website. Awesome!
And if you’re struggling to come up with new passwords, this might help, or you could try a password generator website – there are loads out there to choose from. If you’re ready to make the move to a digital password vault, but are a bit overwhelmed by the amount of websites you need to change your password for, then this is definitely something a Virtual Assistant can help with. Get in touch if you’d like to find out how.