The closest I’ve ever come to having my identity stolen was having my actual laptop physically stolen.  As traumatic as that was to lose,  I can not fathom the amount of frustration and angst Mat Honan experienced having his whole virtual identity stolen.  Amazingly, nothing on my laptop was hacked, (maybe they looked at my pictures or enjoyed my pathetically short iTunes list), but The article “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to my Epic Security Hacking” really shocked me into reality about how lucky I was.

I’m pretty decent as far as passwords are concerned.  I use silly phrases with capital letters and numbers and I never include my birthday, last name, or initials.  I’m not a huge presence online beyond social media, so if you want to hack my Twitter you’re going need to do some research.  I’m also very careful about pop ups or signing up to receive information from websites I’m on.  If I’m getting deeper into a website I’m unfamiliar with and they ask for information too soon, I will almost always click out.  I save all of my work online, usually in two emails but I need to start backing up my work in other ways.

I haven’t set up a password for my screensaver out of laziness, but that’s about to change.  I do have antivirus software on my computer and it intimidates me for some reason, (maybe because one of my laptops started smoking when I was trying to fix it), but I vow to conquer that fear and be better about updating and installing new software.



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