In today's technological world, hackers are part of everyday life. Identity theft, credit card fraud are topics in our daily conversation.
Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to prevent this, however, we can take precautions to protect our on-line personal and corporate information by taking a few easy steps.
Our lives are far too busy and we want to keep it simple and we tend to use the same password for all our accounts, whether its Facebook or our bank accounts. It's hard trying to remember an 8 digit password that has characters, letters and numbers. I'm the first one to admit that I'm guilty.
Create a monthly calendar appointment to change your passwords. It will be easier to set aside an hour or two for this task each month. It will become an admin job that just has to be done.
But the first task will be to start compliing a list of all your accounts. You'll be surprised how much online presence you actually have. Once this is done, it will be very easy going through the list and changing the password of each account. Use sites such as Random.org, The Best VPN and Strong Password Generator to help create secure passwords. Write them down and keep them safe or create a word document with a password protection.
To start you off, here is a small list I've compiled:
- On-line Bank Accounts
- LinkdIn
- Email Accounts (personal and business)
- About Us
- Software registrations - Adobe, Microsoft....
- Business Accounts - Staples, Joomla, Istock photo's...
- On-line Shopping - Amazon, Chapters, Old Navy...
- Blogs
- Magazine subscriptions
Changing passwords on a regular basis will prevent identity theft, spam email, credit card theft and whole lot of hassle you don't want to deal with.
Be safe.
Update! (Sept 13, 2017)
Cyber security is more critical than ever before. If you're interested in learning more about how to set up a strong password, take a look at this article by James Crace at Cloudwards.
What else is happening in the digital marketing world?
I'm ready for incredible marketing!
