Why you should change your ‘123456’ password

It is not a surprise for us anymore to hear how a big company like Spotify, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wipro is being hacked and their customers data breached.

We read it, we get angry on hackers or the company for not making our data safe and forget it until the next breach.

The mistake of ours is that we forget it and think that it is not big deal. Well it is. Hackers are getting smarter and we need to get smarter in protecting our passwords and data. And you know why do hacking cases increase? Because of our lazy attitude towards strong passwords and lack of care for your data.

How do hackers steal our passwords

Let’s look at an example. In 2018 Marriott hotel admitted that they have been hacked and more than 500 million customers data was leaked. Data included emails, birth of date, passport codes, names, addresses, telephone numbers and more. All the data was encrypted with AES128, but there is a possibility that hackers also stole the encryption key.

What hackers can do with this data?

Well, many things. They can carry out identity theft, they could send you an official looking email that lands to a fake website that asks you to register, you register and they get your password. There is a big possibility that you will enter a password that you also use for your email account. And when hackers access your email account, that is all, he has everything. If for example Facebook encounter a data breach and your email and password is leaked, then it is even easier to get your access to your email. Of course the passwords are encrypted, but hackers are smart enough to decrypt it.

More ways how hackers steal our data:

• Unsecured Wifi networks. Open Wifi is one of the easiest ways to get hacked, since when you are connected to it, it is easy to hack into wifi and then hack into your computer.

• Allowing Unknown programs make changes to your computer. Probably those unknown programs that are asking your permission to make changes on your devices will be affected by malware which makes easy for hackers to get your information.

• Linking your Facebook, Twitter or Gmail accounts to suspicious sites. Try not to link your accounts to strange sites, because this allows the site to gain your personal information.

• Unsecured sites. Sites that do not have a lock image might be developed to steal your data. Watch out for these sites especially if you need to write in some sensitive information like bank passwords.

Hackers are getting smarter

Hacker do not sleep, they are finding more creative ways to steal passwords and sensitive information. For example hackers can monitor the way you tilt your phone. They examine how does the phone move while you type in information. Another study found out that hackers can use brainwaves to steal your data. If you want to find out more about these a little bit shocking ways there is an informative blog post created by Surfshark team.

https://surfshark.com/blog/hackers-can-steal-your-passwords-based-on-your-brain-waves-and-phone-tilting-movement-what

How to protect your passwords

1. First of all, I always recommend checking sites like Have I been pwned to see if your email address have been leaked, if it did you should change it immediately.
2. Have different passwords for every account, if you cannot remember them all there are always good password managers, that will keep your passwords encrypted and in one place, you will only need to remember one password to log into the password manager. You can look into such password managers as Dashlane, LastPass, Keeper.
3. Use strong password generators, that create passwords by strong passwords rules, that are hard to encrypt if they are stolen. I personally use Strong Random Password Generator
4. Get a good quality VPN to protect yourself while connected to public wifi and to protect yourself from malware. My recommendations would be Surfshark (They also offers a great deal with 83 % discount), they sure know a lot about security issues and know how to protect users from them, you can see that on their blog that I shared above.
5. Be careful of shady links, emails, unprotected websites. Just always be careful and know that there are a lot of threats going online and if you do not care about your internet security, nobody will, not even the big companies that store your personal information.