The absolute basics you should be doing with online accounts
Have any of your online accounts ever been hacked?
If the answer is yes then you will know how painful it is to get your account back, if you even managed to do that at all.
An account getting hacked is even worse now, with our gmail, icloud accounts holding payment information, contacts and calendar data. Losing access to that can also mean losing access to your phone.
It’s not all bad news, with just a few steps you can get yourself an acceptable level of security. Here is how:
Two factor authentication
Wherever possible, use two factor authentication. For those who don’t know, this allows another level of confirmation when the account is accessed on new devices. A good combo is to use two factor with a pin number sent to a phone. If the service does not use two factor then use the strongest password possible or switch to a competing service that does.
Password generator
Use a password generator to generate complex passwords. Most passwords we come up with ourselves are never good enough. These generate passwords based on hashes and a password you enter along with the domain of the site.
Different passwords
The biggest risk is when people use the same password for multiple sites. One of the sites get hacked and then they try that username/email password combination across all major sites. Services like the password generator mentioned above take care of this by generating the password based on the domain name.