It’s just about impossible to not have to use passwords at your financial institutions these days. It’s definitely not like grandma did it. If you have a bank account, a brokerage account, or a credit card somewhere then you’ll have to have a password in order to access all your info online.
When money and passwords are involved you can expect to find hackers lurking around trying to figure out a way to get to your money. Don’t let them! Avoid these top three mistakes and you should be good to go.
1- Your password is too short and easy to hack
Making up a password for your accounts should be taken seriously. If it’s something too short and too easy to crack then you’re asking for trouble.
So, what exactly is too short or too easy to hack? Really that’s evolving over time, however a good rule of thumb is to make it longer rather than shorter and to use random letters, numbers, and symbols rather than just words that could be found in the dictionary.
This is because hackers use programs to crack your passwords and the first things they run are words from the dictionary and variations of those words. Things like Fr@nk with the letter A changed to the @ symbol is common. Any name or word in the dictionary shouldn’t be used in your password. You should always mix in lowercase and uppercase letters along with numbers and special characters to make your password hard to crack.
2- You use the same password everywhere
If you’re using the same password in more than one place then you need to stop that immediately. That’s especially true for where you keep your money. Please do yourself a favor and make those passwords unique, long, and mix in all sorts of random letters, numbers, and special characters.
Where you keep your money might have the most sophisticated hacker blocking practices at their website, but if you’re using the same password at your free email address site or maybe a blog that you don’t use very often then you’re putting yourself at risk.
Some of these other sites are much easier to hack and when that happens your information is sold in the black market where another hacker will use it to gain access to your important accounts. Please don’t make this mistake and keep your passwords unique everywhere.
3- You don’t make use of extra layers of protection
Hackers are getting better at hacking our information. It’s happening all the time at some of the largest companies in the world. The best way to protect yourself is to make use of everything that’s available to you.
If where you keep your money allows you to add another layer of protection, sometimes called 2 step verification, then you should take advantage of that. It might be a little bit annoying at first, but you’ll get used to it. It’s no more annoying that having to put in your password, and it’s a lot let hassle than having to deal with a hacked account.
Extra layers of protection is usually in the form of some type of 2 step verification. It might be that you can attach your cell phone to your account and after you put in your correct password you’ll get a text message or a call to your attached phone so that you can put in another randomly generated code that you get from your institution.
When you do something like this it makes it that much more difficult for hackers to get to your money. Now they need to crack your password and have your phone in order to get to your accounts.
If where you keep your money doesn’t offer 2 step verification then you should ask them if and when they will add that service. It might be in the works or it might be time to figure out another way to keep your money safe.
Sometimes, simply changing your password every few months will be a good way to deter hackers. That’s because the people that are stealing your passwords are usually not the ones that are using them to steal your accounts. Instead, they take those stolen passwords and sell them in the black market.
Whoever buys them then is the one that tries to crack your account. That usually means a good portion of time in between when your password is stolen and when it’s actually used. If you change your password on a regular basis this should help you out with this problem.
In the end it all comes down to not being lazy. If changing your password every few months doesn’t seem like something you can get on board with then you need to make sure that you take other precautions seriously, like 2 step (or sometimes called 2 factor) authentication. Be diligent with your cyber accounts and you should hopefully keep the criminals away from your money.