LinkedIn and other sites, password hack- how to protect yourself

[Gargoyle]

Last week LinkedIn and some other sites were hacked, millions of logins and passwords stolen. the bandits don't care about your LinkedIn resume or photos- they want to test your login and pw on other sites.

Take this as a reminder, make sure you have a strong password (with upper case, lower case, numbers, maybe other characters) and don't use the same password on multiple sites. If you use the same password on LinkedIn that you use on your bank or credit card site or shopping site, you can get really burned. If you use the same password and login at a dozen little online stores that you use for ebay and paypal, and just one of those sites has weak security and gets hacked, you can get really burned.

I know it's hard to track different passwords, but there are good tools out there that you can use. One that I've used keepass for years, it's a free, open source app from keepass.info and is highly secure. You can organize things into folders, like one for credit card info, one for e-mail accounts, one for banks, so it's easy to find things. It is small and portable- I can copy a tiny highly encrypted file from my desktop to my laptop, and there are even versions for most smart phones, and it just takes seconds to make backup copies.

 

[GardenerGal]

Thanks for the reminder.
I just went and changed some logins.

 

[redhen]

Thanks for the heads up!