Did you celebrate May 7th? That was international password day. Even if you didn’t celebrate, the dark web probably did.
It’s quite likely one or more of your passwords have been stolen.
You think not? How much are you willing to bet? If you use the same password everywhere you’re betting…everything. The bad guys take your credentials stolen from one site and automatically try them on other sites.
While most people have lousy passwords, there’s another problem: Someone can get your password and it isn’t your fault. Worse yet, maybe it isn’t even your bank’s/stockbroker’s/email provider’s fault. What can you do to limit the damage?
Here we go again, only more so. Password theft is, unfortunately, a recurrent theme. An increasingly large volume of login credential theft happens every year as seen in this beautiful but appalling graphic of credential theft.
This year’s crop includes a compromise of 3/4 billion accounts. Conservatively, you have at least a 20% chance of having a compromised account. In practice I suspect your odds are even higher.
The good news is that you can find out if your information was compromised and where it happened and change those passwords.
The bad news is that most people use the same password on multiple sites. That means that if it gets stolen for one site, it’s stolen for the others as well. The worse news is that many sites don’t encrypt your password. The worst news is that people prefer using really lousy passwords. See Who’s Got the Password. for more about avoiding bad passwords.