In news last month, hackers broke into the Gawker website and stole the source code for the site, logs of private chats between the editors, and the e-mail addresses and passwords of 1.5 million registered commenters. Gawker is a widely known gossip website and it took a big hit from this hacker attack. Read how an attack like this can create serious problems for you:
1. Create an email address you can abandon if the address is released publicly. It is not a good idea to use a single email address for all your communications. Use your primary address for correspondence and trusted communications. For website logins, use a dummy address seperate from your primary one that preferably has no name, age, or location contained within it.
2. Use a different password account for every single account on the web. That's right, every single one. Gawkers commenters who used the same password for many accounts risked having them all compromised if their passwords were cracked. When the passwords were stolen by the hackers, they were in encrypted form but can be deciphered with time. Having different passwords for different sites minimizes the damage to you and your identity. If you insist on using just a few passwords, make sure you dont use the same one for a secure bank site as the site with less protective password policies.
3. Use long, difficult to crack passwords. Its challenging to create and remember long, unique passwords for every website. Fortunately, a number of password protection programs can autogenerate and store secure passwords for you.
If your curious about how long it would take to crack a particular password, you can go to HowSecureIsMyPassword.net and they'll tell you.
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