The Roanoker - July/August 2014 - 37

ILLUSTRATION: THE NOUN PROJECT / ALEX AUDA SAMORA

DATA HACKS have become an all-too-frequent part
of the modern world, affecting both businesses and
consumers.
Information thieves with computer skills routinely find chinks in the armor of even cutting-edge,
multinational companies. In December, retail giant
Target acknowledged that hackers had stolen credit
and debit card information from 40 million customers over three weeks following Black Friday.
And in April, it was revealed that a security bug
known as Heartbleed had been embedded in opensource encoding software used by many companies to
secure web servers, potentially leaving a "back door"
that could be exploited by hackers.
Companies like LifeLock offer protection, for a
price, from identity theft and credit fraud, but how
much value do they really give you? What can individuals do for free to protect themselves from hackers
and data thieves?
The world of cyber security can be daunting to
those who are unfamiliar with the inner workings
of coding, websites and information technology. The
good news is there are some simple things that people
can do to protect themselves when it comes to using
email, social media and e-commerce.
Chris Shively works as director of development for
IDD, Inc., a Blacksburg-based information technology that counts as clients a variety of governments,
small businesses, Fortune 500 companies and more.
Joel Yonts serves as a security scientist and advisor for Malicious Streams, a company founded to
focus on digital defense, and he works as the chief
information security officer for a regional Fortune
500 company.

Password Protection
Not all password-protected accounts are created
equally.
Yonts recommends dividing your accounts into
tiers.
Worry about these:
Email accounts, social media accounts and anything connected to finances, including bank accounts,
investment portfolios and retirement accounts.
THE

R OANOKER.COM

Each of these accounts should have a separate
password.
Email and social media may seem like an afterthought, especially compared to finance-related passwords, but they're also crucial. If you forget your password with a particular account, the account-holder
often will send reset information to your email. If a
hacker has your email password, he can often get access to a lot more.
What to do:
Use separate passwords for each account. Good
passwords have a minimum of eight characters and
include a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters like @!#%. Change those
passwords periodically; Shively recommends changing them every two to three months.
In light of the Heartbleed bug, it's more important than ever to change passwords, especially if you
haven't done so since April. Most sites have updated
their software to remove the Heartbleed bug, but if
you're unsure, you can check a site's status with a tool
at lastpass.com. Even if the site has updated its software, one should still change his or her password to
ensure the account won't be compromised.
Don't worry about these quite as much:
Accounts that aren't financially related and that
are not connected to your identity - registering for
coupons, for example - don't require as secure a password. It doesn't hurt, though.
How best to keep track of your different passwords?
Don't save a list of your passwords on your computer, either via email or in a document. You might
handwrite them on a sheet of paper and keep it in a
safe, but even that's not a great idea.
Shively recommends committing them to memory
through practice or implementing a strategy such as
combining a number and word: "If we combined 1970
with the color 'Blue', we could make a strong password
like 1b9Lue70!."
Another Shively idea is to determine how many
accounts will allow you to reset your passwords via
email. "For those accounts, simply reset their passwords when needed," Shively says. "It takes an extra
step but it allows you to remember fewer passwords

When asked
to reset your
password for a
website, do so
by going through
the front page
of the site, not
through clicking
an email link.
JULY/AUGUST 2014

http://www.lastpass.com http://www.THEROANOKER.COM

The Roanoker - July/August 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Roanoker - July/August 2014