Do you have the same password for multiple online accounts? Imagine the worst case senario that can happen if any of your accounts were hacked. These types of accounts are a nightmare if they were hacked: your email, Apple account, bank account, LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter.
You could be publicly embarrassed, financially compromised or worst, compromise your online connections.
Here are a few simple steps to do before 2016 comes around
- Turn on 2 factor authentication. This will use another form of verification besides passwords. Most common is an phone number or a one time pass code generator that has an expiration time.
- Use a password generator like LastPass or KeePassX to create a non-human readable password for every account. This way even if your password was compromised on a site like Target.com, no other account is compromised
- Take a look a your online connections like LinkedIn, Facebook, remove connection who you don’t trust or do not know. It’s good to clean up your social connections. For example: with LinkedIn, all your 1st connections can see your email address.
- Create another email account for your social accounts or any account that exposes your email address to search engines or your social connections. This way even if your social connections were hacked, your email and contact information will not be exposed
- Create a Google Voice number and linked that to your phone number. Always give out your Google Voice number and never your real phone number. This will allow you to easily block anyone who gets your phone number by unknown means.
That’s it, taking these steps will allow you to be more educated about online privacy and security. And you will have better chance to withstand the oncoming cyber security hacks in 2016 and beyond. The hackers out there will leave you alone because there are other people who are much more easily hackable.