Why You Need to Change Your Password (Right Now)
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By George Wright (Contributed)
Is it your birthday? Your child’s birthday? Your dog’s name? Or, even worse, ‘1234′? Believe it or not, these passwords are some of the most commonly used across the Internet. Why should you care? Well, with advances in technology come advanced problems, and one of the biggest problems facing us today is identity theft. Unfortunately, identity theft is very common, very difficult to deal with, and almost impossible to fix after it happens. In fact, really the only way to deal with it is to prevent it as much as possible.
So how do you prevent identity theft? Well, I’m a “cover all the bases” type of guy, so let’s start from the bottom up.
First, we’re going to make it more difficult to break into our accounts online. I know it seems silly, and like it’s a lot of work, but it only takes one hacker for you to lose everything. Especially if you use the same password for everything, it is a huge risk that is really not worth taking. The best thing to do is to create an almost completely random password for every account you have.
I know; you’re laughing at me. You’re saying ‘Do you know how many that would be? How can I keep track?’ There are programs and software specifically designed to do this for you, and they are very affordable. For most of them, you add each site that you have an account with, one at a time. You enter in the website login page and your username, then click ‘create password’, and it will create a totally random password for that site and store it. Now the next time you want to go to that site, you just click it in your program, and it will open the page and log in for you! This makes it all but impossible for any one to break into your accounts (unless they steal your computer).
After this is done, I’d get a biometric reader (if you don’t mind spending the money) that reads your fingerprint; they are actually less than $100. This makes it pretty much impossible to break into your computer, or steal any of your files. Even if you don’t go this far, as least go change all of your bank passwords; protect yourself!
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