Some Good Advice

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

~Brian Bondy

​Not from me, exactly, but still good advice. Of course, first you get a story.

I was recently ‘hacked’. What that means was that I got an email from someone, likely foreign, and it had my Windstream email and password. Normally, I’d ignore it but since they did actually have my password, I was a bit miffed, and upset. The good part is that I’ve been spending the last year getting rid of all my Windstream related accounts. I thought Windstream itself was the only account still related to my Windstream email.

Apparently, my little used LinkedIn account was also Windstream, and it got hacked too. I did recover it, fortunately, or not, whatever. I’m not into all that Social Networking anymore, as it has badly disappointed me. That’s another story. I have multiple emails for various reasons, like through Apple, Microsoft, Gmail, and Fatcow. They are free, and serve to segregate various activities.

My real point though is that you should have better passwords. Unless you really do have some complex ones, chances are they will have been stolen, either from other big data breaches, or by ‘bots’ that just continuously try different combos till they succeed. Likeliest is from breaches though. It’s estimated that BILLIONS of user’s data has been stolen from various big businesses, like Yahoo and Target. https://termly.io/resources/articles/biggest-data-breaches/
Data breaches occur every day, and often we don’t hear about it.  Read The Statistics  
Ransomware is getting fairly common also, read about it here.

So basically, I am NOT trying to scare you. What I want is to remind you to take your security seriously. Turn on two factor authentication wherever possible. Have a real password, not your pet dog's name. Use special characters, numbers, caps and lower-case mixes, and write them down in a notebook dedicated to your passwords. Supposedly, a password management app is a good thing, but that seems a little iffy to me. Experts suggest using one though. Ideally, do NOT use the same password everywhere.  That’s good advice, but I don’t know how realistic it is.   Using unique passwords for your financial accounts is always a good idea. 
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Make a backup. To an external drive, to a cloud storage place, or both, but if you are worried about losing it, then you need it backed up. Finally, read this article, originally from Medicare and edited by the Council on Aging of Oregon.

BTW, the hacker wanted $400 in Crypto for ‘ransom’. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do with the info he had, but I didn’t pay it. I did spend several days changing my passwords and checking my accounts for accuracy, particularly my email and phone number for 2 factor authentication.