October is Cyber Security Awareness month, and it’s a good time to give yourself and your online accounts a good once over.
State consumer protection director Michelle Reinen says one of the best things to do to keep yourself safe online is to lock down your primary email account.
“Be sure that that password is very strong, and where possible use two factor authentication to get in.”
Since you use that account to register for other things like social media or online banking, if a crook gets access to your email, they can potentially get access to everything else you have online.
Reinen suggests using something long, but easy to remember. “Like your favorite musical lyric with numbers and capital letters.”
The idea is to have a password that’s easy for you to remember but hard for a computer to guess. The more characters and numbers you have, the safer that password will be from being broken by hackers.