The most people don’t worry about IT Security. They hear in the news about stolen account data but assume this will never affect them.
I was young and stupid
During Christmas 20… whatever I got a free license for a security suite. Everything was great. The German developer had a good reputation and the download and everything was safe. One year later I got an email that my account data probably got stolen. Whaaaat? Yes the IT Sec. developer got hacked. I never expected that and yep I used the same password for my email account as for the registration of the security suite. I blindly trusted them and thought there is no point to create a new password in my password safe. After my email address was used for spam, luckily the email provider blocked it, I finally got a safe password for the account and… deleted the account.
Again?
Almost 12 years after this incident, a classmate told me about the homepage https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to do a security check of my email address(es). I checked them and… damn. Luckily this time I was prepared and nothing happen, but it is still kind of annoying that somebody could steal my registration data.
What saved my ass the last time?
This is just a short list of things I did and I do now:
- Use a different password for every page and registration
- Enable 2-factor authentication
- Check the internet for breaches
- Use temporary email addresses if possible https://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail
- Use several email accounts and have one you can delete
- Use fake data e.g. fake name, address,…
- Check the
url and addresses of the emails you reply to - Be suspicious, don’t blindly trust
You really have to be aware that the internet isn’t a save place. Protect yourself and always be prepared for the worst case.