Passwords - The Thin Line Between Your Data and Them

How strong or weak are your passwords you use every day to check your email, update your fantasy baseball team and, oh, I don't know, check your bank balances?

If you use the same password for all three of these activities then you are exposing yourself to identity theft. You should never, ever, ever use the password you use for your banking for anything else. You should never, ever, ever use the same password to access your computer as for your access to Webkinz (don't ask).

All too often, people using computers assume that their password is good enough to protect them against malacious use and identity theft. Did you know the CEO of Lifelock, the company that purports to lockdown your identity, has had his identity stolen no less than 13 times? Seems he chose the wrong business to go into.

An Object Lesson

I just had a lesson delivered to me via the internets about trust, cookies and expectations of decent behavior.

In the course of my job, I am at four different school sites on a regular basis. At most of these sites, I take my laptop and do 90% of my work from it.

But at one site, I am fortunate enough to have access to a flat screen Imac with a huge hard drive. The upsides were good, I could leave my laptop at home and travel lighter, I could attach the projector permanently, I could delete all the music files that were inappropriate for an elementary school environment.

But I've just learned that leaving a computer with passwords logged, cookies enabled and, effectively, my entire digital life unlocked, is a very, very dangerous thing to do. Because I'm not in that computer lab all the time and I generally do not log everything out when I leave there, I am exposing myself to greater risk than I should. And, from this day forward, I will not.

That one tweet in my Twitter stream was like a blaring claxon call to arms, to protect my digital identity, to seal off easy avenues of entry and to make it more than passably difficult to infiltrate. Am I pissed off? You fucking bet I am.

And I'm going to make it perfectly clear to the person who posted to my Twitter stream just how fucking pissed off I am. And how much of an invasion he did by broadcasting his message to my audience. I'm actually kind of amazed at really how angry I am about this. Maybe part of that anger should be directed at myself for being too trusting (which isn't usually a problem).

Either way, there's going to be some changes made starting tomorrow morning at 8 am sharp.