This article has been provided by our editorial partners at Techlicious, the website that makes tech simple with practical tips for saving money, saving time, and getting more out of the technology in your life.
There have been so many breaches of personal data recently that it is almost impossible for the average person to know whether their information may have been compromised. Was your email address and password stolen from Sony PlayStation's servers? How about the massive theft at Epsilon, email marketer for the Fortune 500? A new site called Should I Change My Password.com is here to help.
Created by Australian security expert Daniel Grzelak, shouldichangemypassword.com tells you whether your email address was one of the one-million-plus stolen in recent hacker attacks. You simply visit the site and enter your email address. The site checks your email against the databases of stolen information released by the hackers themselves — either for bragging rights or to make a statement — and alerts you if you are on the list and how many times your data has been stolen. Grzelak says that he will keep the site up to date as new lists of stolen emails are released by hackers.
Heed the Wake-Up Call
If your email comes up clean, it doesn't necessarily mean you're in the clear, just that you weren't a victim of the recent high profile thefts where information was released. Either way, these crimes are a wake-up call that we all need to stay on our toes when it comes to protecting our privacy.
The first step is to choose complex passwords that can't be easily guessed. Then ensure you're able to contain the damage if your data is hacked is by using separate passwords for every site you visit. Password management programs can make that process easy.
In December 2009, a hacker posted on the Internet 32 million passwords stolen from the website RockYou.com. Yes, that's right — 32 million stolen passwords. This list of passwords provided a unique, if unfortunate, opportunity to study whether people are using passwords effectively to protect their personal information.
The results? Not good.
Get Creative
An analysis of the passwords by security firm Imperva shows that using easy-to-hack passwords is still far too common. In fact, nearly 1 percent of RockYou.com users had 123456 as their password. And a full 20 percent used one of 5,000 common passwords.
Among the other most common passwords are password, iloveyou, abc123, princess, qwerty, jessica, michael, and 654321.
The practical impact of this is huge. According to Imperva's Chief Technology Officer Amichai Shulman, "Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today's world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second — or 1,000 accounts every 17 minutes."
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