November 13, 2008

Boy Do I Feel Sheepish

I am not usually a sucker. I pride myself on that. However, yesterday I had a giant red "S" on my forehead when I decided to find out my Twitterank. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Turns out all of Twitterland is abuzz about how anyone who made the same decision I did are now exposed to phishing scams, stolen identities, going home to find their house had been stolen, etc. OK, maybe not THAT bad, but still.
Last night I spent over an hour changing my password for all the sites that shared the same password as Twitter. Maybe I didn't actually need to change all the passwords, but still.
Luckily, the particular password that I used for Twitter wasn't one that was tied to any site that has really personal or financial information. In this day and age, who knows what a person can find out about you from a simple password connected to a seemingly innocuous web application? Who knows if there is anything they can't find out?
In the end, it is a good lesson for us all to change our passwords often. I had been using that particular password for several years. It might be an inconvenience for awhile to force my fingers to move to different characters on my keyboard until I get used to typing the new password, but each time I have to do it, I will remember the near-miss of Twitterank.
If you looked in the mirror yesterday or today to find a big red "S" staring back at you, read more on Adam Ostrow's blog post, or the post by Oliver Mark.

Strong Passwords & Password Security
After my near-miss yesterday, it got me to thinking about password storage and security. I did some searching on the web and found this article from Microsoft on creating strong passwords. About halfway down the article is a link to click to see if your password is considered "strong". There are good tips here for keeping your passwords secure as well.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for being willing to share your experience so that more people don't get suckered into these phishing scams! It's a shame that they're occurring and they get viral before someone figures out what is going on, but at least thanks to blogs and social media we can get the word out before too many people are compromised!

    ReplyDelete