The internet, a place of wonder and magic, somewhere to while away hours for your own amusement or pursuit of knowledge and where you can manage and buy services in a huge digital marketplace. However, it’s also a place where you can be very easily hacked and your credit card details stolen, which we can all agree isn’t very wonderful or magical.
With the vast amount of transactions taking place online these days everywhere we store card details they must be backed up with usernames and passwords. Very commonly these usernames are simply our email addresses and the passwords vary very little between different websites – how would we remember them all? It’s all very well trying to make every single one unique, but according to the CSID Consumer Survey the average user could have as many as 17 private passwords, and 8.5 for work.
The recent security scares at eBay, Sony, Adobe and Apple have sparked speculation on how safe our details really are. If Apple can download a U2 album into half a billion accounts, what can they take out? A breach in Apple’s security meant that quite a few famous young actresses have just had their very private photos stolen and thrown to the blood-thirsty wolf pack that is social media. If someone has stolen my Adobe details, it’s not because they’re planning on ransacking my Photoshop liberties. It’s because they want free access to my card details, and bank account. It’s very easy to ignore these scandals, shrugging them off and assuming that it won’t happen to you. With the eBay scare, it was only because eBay contacted me so promptly requesting an immediate password change that I took positive action. Security scares from other companies are filtered to us through the lens of the media, and we are more likely to react and actually change passwords if the company gets in touch. However, there is a clever little website that tells you if you’ve been hacked into or affected by any security breaches: haveibeenpwned.com.
Type in your username or login details of whatever site you suspect has been compromised. The website then checks all its lists of cached copies of the stolen lists to check if you are at risk. If your name comes up you can quickly change the passwords to limit damage – or call your bank manager. Nifty eh? We discovered this through an excellent article by Stephen Cassidy on PC Pro – the perfect and simple way to find out if you are at risk. Be clever about your online presence, there’s no need to be targeted if you’re wise to what can happen, it’s a big wide web out there. Take a few minutes to change your passwords or adjust them, so that if your details are stolen you can ensure they are not easily transferable between your various online profile. Be safe!