Finding time to stay safe on the web gets more and more complicated each day.  Was yours one of the Linkedin passwords that got hacked recently?

I hope it wasn’t, but to be safe, today I want to share some resources to help keep your information more secure. For starters, here is an article from CNN that Solo-E’s Terri Zwierzynski recently shared.  Titled “After LinkedIn: How to protect your password from hacks” it offers some very helpful information about the Linkedin event and what you can do to protect yourself from having your information compromised.

And in case you don’t know whether your password was one of the ones hacked, the article includes a tool that was created by Last Pass for checking to see the status of your password.  (There is also a tool for checking your eHarmony password, as those were hacked as well.)

The article also includes tips for creating passwords that are very secure.  It is so important to take this seriously – even on so-called ‘secure’ sites.

Even in cases such as the LinkedIn breach, when it’s a website, not a personal account, that’s being hacked, the strength of your password can still help keep you safe.

On sites such as LinkedIn, stored passwords are “hashed,” meaning the site uses an algorithm to encode them. So, even if hackers get the data, they still have to unravel them before they’re useful.

“Don’t give up. Don’t think this is all futile,” Cluley said. “Choose a long, hard-to-crack, unique password. Not dictionary words. Not a sequence of numbers — use something that basically looks like gobbledygook. Those will be tougher for the bad guys to crack.”

Your passwords are one element of your on-line protection that you can have total control over – so I advise you to make them as complicated as possible.

A tool that can be very helpful, both for generating and storing passwords is Last Pass.  As mentioned in the CNN article, it comes well reviewed and is extremely secure (from everything we’ve read).  Another plus is the fact that it is web-based, so you can access the passwords you need no matter where you are and what device you’re using to check in from.

We’ve been doing an overhaul of our passwords here at The Time Finder, even though ours wasn’t one of the ones compromised on Linkedin.   My hope for you is that your passwords weren’t compromised either, AND that you (rightly) view this event as a timely caution.  Take the opportunity to make your passwords more complex and unique.

Safety on the web couldn’t be more important – especially if you are running (or working in) a web-based business.   Securing your internet accounts with strong-passwords is like setting good boundaries.  It’s time well spent.   Take care of yourself – it will save you time and stand you in good stead over the long term!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2012 at 10:30 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Marketing Essentials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.