No? Good! There's hope.
We hear about people getting "hacked" all the time but unlike many risks in life, this one is usually easy to mitigate. We're not talking about leaving your phone signed into facebook and having your buddy grab it and post something funny. We're talking about no longer being able to access your email account because someone has taken it over so that they can use it. We’re talking about someone using your facebook and your website to hack other unsuspecting, technically literate people. Here are three simple things you can do today to avoid the digital equivalent of locking your front door and leaving the key in the hole.
- Use a good password. It’s debatable whether it's technically more secure to use a completely random combination of characters or a phrase, but NEVER use a simple one word password or information about yourself. "money" or your daughter’s birthday will get you locked out of your bank and/or digital life at some point - Something like: dU1I48x$lX!l#mn or I-Really-Like-2-Code will almost certainly not. The logic is that a sufficiently long (at least eight characters) combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special symbols could take a computer literally hundreds or thousands of years to figure out for a bad guy.
- Use different passwords for different accounts. At the very least, use a different password for your primary email account. There are sites that exist for the sole purpose of listing the hundreds of other sites that get hacked every single day. What if you signed up to use one of those sites with your email address and password... and the password just happened to be the same one you use for the email address you signed up for? What happens if all of the other tools you use, send password resets to that email address?
- If your email provider offers a two step authentication feature, use it. To be honest, this isn't the easiest one on the list but it's well worth the trouble and you can expect more detail from us on it soon. In sum, if someone does obtain your password - trust us, it happens - this feature still keeps them out. When your email account is accessed from a new device, complete with correct username and password, this feature adds the step of sending you a text message (or an automated voice call) with a special access code that has to be input after the password. So, to get into your email, a hacker would require both your password AND your phone. Set up two step authentication here if your using gmail or google apps.
Bonus. Don't answer security questions honestly. Anyone can find out your mothers maiden name and the city you were born in or where you went to high school. Depending on your Facebook habits it could be easy to get all that data, and your first pet’s name as well. Just ask Sarah Palin.