Every single day there is a new data breach where confidential information is lost. Data breaches have happened at Equifax, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many more.
A few weeks ago a security researcher found a treasure trove of 184 million emails, logins, and passwords stored on the internet. The information was associated with Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the US government, and financial services accounts.
Unfortunately there is no way to know how many people have copies of this data.
I know it’s not easy to remember hundreds of passwords, but these are some important tips to keep you secure:
- Never use the same password on more than one website
- Don’t use the same format for different sites: yahoo74-8$, gmail74-8$, facebook74-8$
- Always create strong (unique and complicated) passwords
- Use a second method for confirming your login (called two-factor authentication or multifactor authentication), even if it must be through text messaging or an email
Criminals also try to hack your email which makes two-factor authentication (“2FA”) or multifactor authentication (“MFA”) suspectable to criminals, but this is hard for them to do if you have a strong password on your email account.
I’m positive the passwords you currently use are in many of the data breaches. I’ll do a post soon on password managers (software where you can store your passwords), but if you like to write down your passwords, there are lots of password log books on Amazon.