Password Security

by Phillip Judd

This year, attacks on websites are at an all-time high.  The amount of personal identity attacks are up by 200 percent over 2010. That is 12 million pieces of personal information.  I talk about this quite frequently, but changing your password on a regular basis is a good way to protect yourself from these attacks. Most people do not change their passwords due to having to remember different passwords. They also use the same password for multiple sites which is also a bad idea. There are programs on the market that help with this and my favorite is RoboForm. It is a browser plugin that manages your passwords while you use the internet and integrates with all of your favorite devices as well. With RoboForm you only have to remember one master password. This helps you create complex passwords for each website you have a login for without having to remember these passwords, so you can keep a different password for every site you visit. After that it is just remembering to change it on a fairly regular basis just in case one of the sites you use gets attacked.

Another way to protect yourself is to sign up for a service like LifeLock. These services monitor your personal information and notify you of any activity that may be fraudulent. This is important; due to it will be easier to take care of an identity theft issue if you catch it before it goes too far.

Some of the recent attacks:

LinkedIn, eHarmony, Last.fm, Yahoo, Android Forums, Billabong, Formspring, and Nvidia.

If you have an account with any of the above and haven’t changed your password recently then you should change it now. Also, you should change the password on other sites that you use the same password.

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Mike Ledbetter

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