Protecting Yourself From Cyber Threats



I hadn’t intended to be off-topic again, but the recent hacking of Linked In got me to thinking about this.



The internet is here to stay and it is marvelous technology that I couldn’t imagine doing without, but that being said, you need to protect yourself from the people who haven’t anything better to do than cause you misery by hacking into websites.


It’s a shame that some of our society is like this, but I guess there will always be people of this caliber lurking about.


We need to take special care with what we can do to protect ourselves and one thing is selecting a secure password or passwords, as the case may be.


I don’t know if all of you have heard of Kim Komando, but I suspect a great many of you have. She has a radio show on every Sat and has a great website that includes all kinds of useful tips, tricks, and freebies in all areas of technology. She has tried all these sites out so knows they are malware and virus free. Therefore, you can feel pretty secure downloading anything she recommends.


I urge you to check out her site here: http://www.kinkomando.com/

And this is the link for how to decide on a secure password:
http://www.komando.com/coolsites/index.aspx?id=1503&page=3


I know many of you have already changed your passwords at Linked In, but if you haven’t please check this out. Remember it is best to memorize your passwords and have a different one for every site you frequent, so if one is hacked they aren’t all compromised.


Of course you may ask yourself, who can memorize 10 or more passwords? It is not safe to store them online in some program in case the net goes down, so the only solution is to memorize them, or keep a “cheat sheet” in some unknown location, .like I do. I would never be able to memorize passwords to that many locations. Keeping a “cheat sheet” probably isn’t the perfect answer either, but at least I have excess to them if there is some failure in the system.


Anyway, the main point is to select a secure password that is hard to detect by hackers – one including numbers, letters, and special characters and at least eight characters long, the longer the better.