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.
As mentioned in Yet Another Password Theft, you can look up your email address(es) to see some data breaches affecting you. The website mentioned will also tell you if a data breach involved phone numbers, names, addresses, or passwords.
By no means are those databases the only ones out there. The bad guys buying and selling your information have many more.
So, how do you protect yourself when computer crime is such a money maker?
- Use decent passwords, per Who’s got the password? Otherwise it’s trivial to decode your password.
- Go the extra mile with either:
- A password manager per, If your password protects you who protects it? It’s not much more work and potentially saves you a lot of misery.
- Even a crummy password with Two Factor authentication is hard to exploit.
- Check periodically (per YAPT) to see if a new theft is known to affect you. Change all compromised passwords.
- If you use the same password in multiple places, change them–your password is only as strong as the weakest link. Do you really want an exploit at the place you bought a t-shirt from to let the bad guy get into your bank account with the same password?
- If you have a Google account try out their check for compromised, reused, or bad passwords.