If you were paying attention to the social media feeds of Jack Black and Katy Perry recently, you would have read that one had died and the other went on a tirade, but neither was true.
As it turns out, their social media accounts were hacked. The same was true of a famous social media founder.
So, if the founder of one of the most popular social media websites can’t keep his password safe, is there any hope for the rest of us?
There is actually. The first thing we all have going for us is we’re not known by millions of people, so there won’t be that many hackers trying to gain access to our accounts.
But that doesn’t mean everyone in small towns like ours are safe. For the most part, if you find a strange post on your Twitter feed, it could very well have been because you left your account signed in when your roommate or some other prankster found your laptop/tablet on the coffee table.
What this all boils down to is diligence. When you’re finished reading the mundane details of other people’s lives, be sure to sign out, especially if other people in the home or office share the same devices.
The most important thing you can do to prevent someone else from posing as you online is to form a strong password. This is where you will want to take a middle-of-the-road approach. It shouldn’t be too tough, otherwise you just locked yourself if you forgot to write it down. But at the same time it shouldn’t be easy to guess either. By the way, “password” and “12345” are both really bad passwords.
A good password will employ not just lowercase and capital letters, but numerals and symbols as well.
Finally, be sure to not use the same password for multiple sites, and change your password from time to time.