Do you feel bombarded by the constant barrage of articles and warnings on protection of personal information? It does feel at times like we are under siege, and to listen to cybersecurity experts, maybe we are. No, this is not a blog for conspiracy theorists. It's just another of those reminders that cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously.
The Experian data breach seems to have been the one that got a lot of peoples' attention. It's especially egregious because this is not a site that we sign up for ourselves. They collect information on us from others - our banks, our lenders, our credit card companies among others. The recommended action to protect yourself in future is to freeze your account at the three major credit bureaus: Experian, Transunion , and Equifax. It's a fairly simple process but be sure to record your PIN from the process to access later changes.
By the way, you can get free credit reports without going through the "FreeCreditReport" website. Some of those are trying to sell related services. Here's a good government site with everything you ever wanted to know about your credit www.usa.gov/credit-reports
We've all heard it - create a password for each account on line, and use a separate one on each. Then of course you forget the password and have to go through that cumbersome "forgot your password" process. Avoid that headache with a file where you collect your passwords as you create them. Of course keep that somewhere secure in your home or office.
Or use a better way to bypass all of that and keep up to date on your own online security with two excellent resources. The first is Troy Hunt who started Have I Been Pwned. Besides having his own company and being an internationally recognized security expert, he's a Microsoft Regional Director - but we won't hold that against him. He created a free resource for anyone to quickly assess if they may have been put at risk due to an online account of theirs having been compromised or "pwned" in a data breach. Just go to his site and enter your email to check.
The second resource is listed in Hunt's steps for better protection - a password manager. There are several programs that will create and keep a record of passwords for you. The one that is recommended here has a very good reputation. And sign up for Hunt's notification service while you're at his site. If your information comes up in a new data breach, he will send you an email to alert you to it.
The Experian data breach seems to have been the one that got a lot of peoples' attention. It's especially egregious because this is not a site that we sign up for ourselves. They collect information on us from others - our banks, our lenders, our credit card companies among others. The recommended action to protect yourself in future is to freeze your account at the three major credit bureaus: Experian, Transunion , and Equifax. It's a fairly simple process but be sure to record your PIN from the process to access later changes.
By the way, you can get free credit reports without going through the "FreeCreditReport" website. Some of those are trying to sell related services. Here's a good government site with everything you ever wanted to know about your credit www.usa.gov/credit-reports
We've all heard it - create a password for each account on line, and use a separate one on each. Then of course you forget the password and have to go through that cumbersome "forgot your password" process. Avoid that headache with a file where you collect your passwords as you create them. Of course keep that somewhere secure in your home or office.
Or use a better way to bypass all of that and keep up to date on your own online security with two excellent resources. The first is Troy Hunt who started Have I Been Pwned. Besides having his own company and being an internationally recognized security expert, he's a Microsoft Regional Director - but we won't hold that against him. He created a free resource for anyone to quickly assess if they may have been put at risk due to an online account of theirs having been compromised or "pwned" in a data breach. Just go to his site and enter your email to check.
The second resource is listed in Hunt's steps for better protection - a password manager. There are several programs that will create and keep a record of passwords for you. The one that is recommended here has a very good reputation. And sign up for Hunt's notification service while you're at his site. If your information comes up in a new data breach, he will send you an email to alert you to it.