Twitter hack June 2016

You might recall hearing a few months back something on the news about LinkedIn being hacked. Following that story, they announced the information stolen was login information, both username (which is often your email address) and password.

“I never use LinkedIn. I set it up a while ago but haven’t logged in for maybe a year?”

Does that sound familiar?

You may think that you don’t need to worry about your login because you never use the account. I want you to step back a moment and think: how many times a day do you have to log into a website while on the computer? One time? Ten?

How many of those accounts share login information? Amazon… email… Google+… eBay… your bank? Maybe you weren’t as clever as you thought when you made one password to log in to every account.

Today on the news, there was an announcement that Twitter had been hacked this week. Supposedly, more than 32 million login credentials are being sold on the dark web. At this point, Twitter maintains that they have not had a breach to their system.[1]

What do I think?

If you use LinkedIn, or ever have, my suggestion is to start there and continue on to all of the sites you use regularly and change your login information, especially if they all share the username and password. While logging into 20 websites a day can be a lot of passwords to remember, try at least coming up with one password that is used for locations without your vital information, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, and for sensitive sites like your banking and other bills, try as often as you can to vary the passwords. Alternatively, put it on your calendar to go change those passwords once every month or two.

Should your social media be hacked, your money and identity should be safe. Also, because your email is the one account that all of those sites refer back to, keep that password completely different from everything else.

Finally, this may be the best time to find your graveyard of abandoned profiles! Any profiles you remember setting up but never followed through on, delete. A great way to find all of those if you don’t have the time? Find out more about my “Online Presence Audit.”

I will check you out using an exhaustive checklist and Google Searches to find all the places you appear online. Then I will give you an action plan to clean up your presence. Email me today to get that started!

In closing, don’t feel bad when it comes to passwords. Even Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg’s personal accounts have been hacked. I hear his favorite password was “dadada.” Cute.[2]

 

[1]  Shu, C & Conger, K. (2016, Jun 8). Passwords for 32M Twitter accounts may have been hacked and leaked. Tech Crunch. Web.  https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/08/twitter-hack/

[2]  Rogers, Katie. (2016, Jun 6).  If Mark Zuckerberg Can Be Hacked on Twitter, So Can You. New York Times. Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/technology/if-mark-zuckerberg-can-be-a-hacking-victim-so-can-you.html?_r=0