On this episode of How To Money, Matt and Joel talk with Carole Theriault, a cybersecurity expert, about how to protect our online accounts from hackers. We’re all pretty good at locking our doors and enabling a security system to prevent our homes and cars from theft – but many of us are not so good at protecting our information online, which leaves us vulnerable to hackers who will either threaten to publish your personal information unless you pay them some amount of money, or will simply use your information to empty your accounts themselves. Either way, online security means a lot for our money, so it’s important to know the best ways to keep our information safe.
Unsurprisingly, passwords are the number one thing we need to worry about, Carole says. Because we need so many accounts and passwords these days, it’s far too common to create a password you’ll find easy to remember: Using your partner’s name or your pet’s name, for example, and using the same password for everything. Carole warns us against this. A lot of that personal information can be found on our social media accounts, first of all – even birthdays, middle names, elementary schools, and so on aren’t very hard to discover if you’re looking for them. And if you use the same password for everything, a hacker that manages to get into your Facebook account can now also get into your bank account, your PayPal account, and your investment account with ease. Carole knows it’s a pain, but it’s really important to have a different password for everything, and make sure those passwords are strong and complicated to guess – some of her passwords are 50 characters long!
Obviously, there aren’t many of us who would be able to remember multiple 50-character passwords, but fortunately there are a lot of password managers out there – basically vaults that store all your login credentials for you and fill in those fields when you go to that website or app: “One password to rule them all,” Joel jokes. Plus, those managers can usually tell if you’re visiting a website that can’t be trusted. A lot of hackers will “spoof” a site, making it look legitimate so you’ll fill in the information they want; even an expert like Carole can have a hard time distinguishing a real site from a fake one. But the password manager can tell, and it won’t fill in your info for you automatically – a great clue that you might be in the wrong place. They also get into securing ourselves from our smart devices or when using public Wifi connections, the importance of wiping old devices before getting rid of them, and much more; get all this great information about keeping your identity online secure on this episode of How To Money.
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