Is It Your Turn to Get Hacked?

It seems like every time we turn around we hear of some big company getting hacked, resulting in our personal information getting “out there.”

Did you know that 47% of US adults have been hacked in the last 12 months?! That means every other person has been hacked. If you haven’t been hacked, it means your spouse or your neighbor has been.

While we don’t have control over what big companies do or don’t do… and they are all vulnerable because the enemy is determined to hack into databases… we do have control over how we handle our own company or access to our own private information.

It’s 90% our own fault we get hacked… due to laziness, inconvenience, and so forth. We make the hacker’s job easy and we need to stop it! Myself included.

Even if we take care of a few simple, though admittedly inconvenient things, we will be many steps ahead of those who don’t.

Password Security is critical and it’s amazing how many people still use “password” or “12345” as their password. Check out Password Security: Protect Your Site for a more in depth discussion about passwords and why it’s important to choose a good password.

For added security, many companies are adding security questions. But it is a major hole in security. How can that be? If a hacker knows the answer to “your pet’s name” or “the grade school you attended” he/she can gain access to your account, change the password and has everything they need for identity theft. Scary, huh?

If you have a WordPress site, what is your username? Is it “admin”? Change it! If you don’t, hackers are halfway to figuring out how to access your site.

Don’t use your company name as your username either, it only takes a few minutes or seconds longer to figure out your username.

And what about Facebook? What?! What does Facebook have to do with getting hacked?

Facebook has never been about security, it’s been about connecting with people. If you’re like me, the more you use Facebook, the more relaxed you get about using it.

There are 600,000 illegal Facebook logins per day!

Don’t participate in Throw Back Thursday or any of those posts that ask for personal information that could give hackers the missing pieces to figuring out what your passwords are.

Every account should have a different password, because if hackers gain access to your password for one account, they can gain access to many or all of your accounts if you use the same password.

How can you possibly keep track of all those passwords, especially when they are a combination of numbers, letters, and symbols?

Use a Password Manager like LastPass or 1Password. It keeps track of your passwords for you and you only need to remember one password, the one for the Password Manager). But use a strong password for the Password Manager!

I will be going deeper into security in coming posts and you can protect what you can protect, so stay tuned.