Before this week, I had always thought of myself as someone who doesn’t need to take a lot of security measures. The only place I really do is with my bank accounts, but I now realize that everything is connected and for me to be protecting myself to the fullest, I need to be taking security more seriously.
I am definitely one of those people who use the same two or three passwords with slight variations for everything. I realize that this is problematic, but for the longest time, ease of access was more important to me than having different, secure passwords.
If I hadn’t logged into a site in a long time, I knew I could try a few different variations of passwords and eventually I’d get in. However, if I can do this, that means that anyone else who figures out even one of my password variations could too.
On my phone I even have my fingerprint attached to my passwords so I don’t have to type them in every time. While this is obviously very convenient, touch ID can be easily falsified. I always thought this was the case, but I never bothered to look into it until this week.
This article from the New York Times does a good job of explaining why we should be wary of using touch ID.
While I know that I really have nothing to hide, at least from the government, I do want to start being more cautious when it comes to security. I’ve been way too relaxed on my security measures so far, and thinking about it further, I know that it would be very easy for someone to obtain and misuse my information with the way I have it protected now.
The main change I want to make is to start using a password manager. Since all of my passwords are essentially the same, I think this is the best place for me to start. At least with all of my passwords being different for each site, I would have a lower chance of being hacked on a large scale. Right now, if you know the password to my YouTube you could easily discover the password to my bank accounts, and that’s unacceptable.
Password managers help you create long, intricate passwords that are different for each website. The best password managers also encrypt this data when it is stored so it becomes increasingly difficult to hack the password managing platform itself.
I didn’t even know that such a thing existed before this week, and if you didn’t either, reading this article could be a good place to start.
While I know there are other things I could be doing like updating all of my system’s software regularly, something I’m notorious for putting off, or even installing plugins that could help protect me from being spied on online, I think that obtaining a password manager is a good start.
I have a long way to go if I want to protect myself fully, but I think that with this new found realization of just how important privacy and security is, I will eventually be able to get to a place where I feel secure online.
