Security Breaches Endanger Your Personal Information

Do you ever feel as if some unknown person could simply reach into your wallet and steal the money and credit cards you keep there?  Security breaches have become so common during the past year that many of us have put our finances at risk without even knowing it.

Just today, Barnes and Noble admitted that the PIN machines in their stores had been hacked, allowing the hackers access to debit card information including the PIN numbers that customers had used. This is not the only company to have experienced this type of breach.

According to LifeLock, 400,000 Yahoo! accounts, 6.5 million LinkedIn accounts, and 24 million Zappos customers had their account information stolen in the first half of 2012.  This is in addition to the many banks and schools that also had data retrieved by unauthorized people.

USA.gov also released a warning today about Smartphones.  Their report stated that people who own Smartphones are 33% more likely to be the victims of identity theft than people who use an older style cellphone.

Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft

LifeLock has these suggestions to help people protect themselves:

Install security software on your Smartphone.  Many people who have security software on their home computers do not realize that they should also install similar software on their Smartphones.

Only use secure wireless networks to use your laptop.  This will make it less likely that your computer will be hacked while you are using it.

Since about 1/4 of us store personal financial information on our laptops, never let yours out of your sight.  While it is out of your possession, someone could steal sensitive information.

Change your passwords often.  According to an article on Yahoo!, we should also avoid using popular passwords that thieves are likely to try.  The most common passwords are:  password, 123456, 12345678, abc123, querty, monkey, letmein, dragon, 111111, baseball, iloveyou, trustno1, 1234567, sunshine, master, 123123, welcome, shadow, ashley, football, jesus, michael, ninja, mustang, password1.

Instead, create passwords in more unique ways.  For example, you could use the first letter in every word in a phrase you like, or combine two words.  If you replace a letter with a symbol somewhere in your password, you will create an even stronger password.

You are reading from the blog:  http://lies-and-liars.blogspot.com

Photo of wallet courtey of www.morguefile.com