With the Epsilon email breach barely in the technology rear view mirror, now would be a good time to rehash your personal email policies. When I say ‘personal email policies’ I am somewhat bringing to light what many of you should already know if you have an email address. There are many rules you should live by when logging into your email account, and here are a few that could save you from the arduous process of recovering from identity theft.
Never open an email from someone you do not know!! I cannot stress this enough since so many people enjoy reading chain letters and funny jokes these days they think the reward is worth the risk, guess what… it’s not. So you just recieved an e-mail that says ‘You’ve just been selected for a free Cruise opportunity!’ and is from coolcruis99@aol.com. You have no clue who coolcruis99@aol.com is but this sounds too good to be true and worth the risk doesn’t it, a free cruise! Well it is too good to be true, because when you open the email it has an infectious attachment, or asks you to supply information, which brings us to our next point. Trust me, you’re not missing out on anything if you just delete and add to spam these types of emails. You hang up on telemarketers don’t you?
Never supply personal information in an email. I’m sure you’ve gotten those emails from your bank that your monthly statement is available or something of that nature. Of course they never embed areas for you to input your username or password, or even a social security number. Financial institutions, online shopping sites, pretty much every legitimate business will NEVER ask you to reply to an email with your personal information. Treat email like a face to face conversation, ask yourself questions like, ‘would I give a stranger on the street my social security number just because he says he works for Capital One? NO! So never give personal information in email, even to a friend or family member. You know how many times people accidentally forward email? What if one with your bank account information you mailed to your wife was forwarded to her entire contact list? Or if she was infected and your information was compromised by a virus?
Passwords. I could write a novel about passwords and how important they are yet people do not realize the severity of creating a password of ’12345′. Use complex passwords and rotate them from time to time. Who says you have to keep the same password for your banking site from the time you open the account. To quote Microsoft, “You should set password policy to require complex passwords, which contain a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, and are typically a minimum of seven characters long or more for all accounts”. For instance you can make your already ‘un-complex easy to hack silly’ password bulletproof by just changing up the format. Let’s take the word ‘pineapple’ for instance.
As you can see in the above image, simply replacing letters for numbers/symbols makes a pretty simple password moderately complex. If you want to check how complex/secure your password is, you can always use the Microsoft Password Checker. Creating complex passwords may seem like a bothersome process, also creating hard to remember passwords for those sites you only visit from time to time. You can also invest in a free Password Database program like Keypass or LastPass, both of which can manage your passwords and even apply them to the website when you visit them (just be careful especially with financial institutions)
If you have any questions feel free to comment, and remember to be safe with passwords because nowadays everyone is watching…
