Secure your email
With Internet fraud on the increase it is becoming increasingly important to protect yourself and your personal details. One slip up can cause sufficient damage to mess up your day and possibly cost you dearly. One thing you should do for a start is to protect your passwords.
Speak to anyone involved in the Internet security industry and they will tell you it is very important to have different passwords for every major account you log into. This sounds obvious, right? Well yes, it is, and lots of online companies help you out by forcing you to have a complicated password, or even generating one for you. That’s good, right?
Well no, not really. Consider it like this. You have an email account which you access every day, often from multiple locations. It stands to reason that this account is the one you log into more than most of your accounts. The more you use it the more vulnerable it is.
You may think that last statement is not accurate, that your password is strong and nobody can know it. You might be right, but the first time you need to use a public computer to access your email, can you be sure there isn’t a keylogger on the computer you are using? Can you be sure their systems are secure and that the kid in the corner with his Macbook isn’t waiting to steal your password?
This all sounds a little far fetched, and indeed it is rare, but it does happen. Every day there are thousands of people email accounts getting compromised. It is the most popular type of account to hack.
The main reason email accounts are hacked is to use these accounts for spam, but the other reason they are hacked is they contain all sorts of account data.
The thing is, this is often not your fault. You sign up for a service, enter your secure password and wait for your confirmation email. You check your email and there is your username and password as a “helpful reminder” in plain text!
If a hacker manages to hack your email account they now have access to your email, as well as the other account you have signed up for. If you happen to use the same password for other accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Bank!) then they may try to gain access to those too.
This is a big problem, and as individuals we can try to stem it by deleting these emails (from the trash too!), but the real issue is companies sending them out in the first place.
As a final word of advice, try to keep to these following rules:
- Keep your email password as secure as possible (letters + numbers etc)
- Use different passwords for all accounts (not even similar)
- Change your main email password every now and then
- Delete emails with passwords in them (and empty the trash)
- Never trust a public computer. If you must use one, change your password asap
- Never use any common passwords