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By Eric Ravenscraft From PC magazine Data breaches are a regular occurrence these days, but have hackers been digging around in your personal information? These tools will help you figure out if your online accounts have been hacked, and your email addresses and passwords stolen. Large data breaches happen with uncomfortable frequency. It has never been more necessary to secure your online accounts with a password manager and two-factor authentication, where available. But what if a service you use is hacked? The following tools can help you determine if your accounts were caught up in a breach.

Re-posted from the NYS Enterprise Information Security Office 's March 2017 Newsletter.   View more of their great newsletter topics here .  From the Desk of Thomas F. Duffy, Chair Day in and day out, employees hear the same things from their IT staff about cybersecurity and safety. Though they may sound like a broken record, there are very important reasons and rationale behind these practices and advice. Keeping safe and secure while connected isn't just about how your system is set up - it is also very much about how you end up using it. Below, we discuss some common IT staff wisdom and provide some background information and the rationale as to why it definitely merits your attention.   Make sure you lock your screen when you are away from your desk: Screen locking policies exist for a reason. Even if you are leaving for just a few minutes at a time, be sure to lock your screen. Though physical intruders are rare during daytime and in convent...

From ConsumerAffairs : Many people log in to multiple online accounts every day, including financial, email and social media accounts. Having strong passwords for each websites helps protect consumers from identity thieves. A strong password is complex, long and unique, and, therefore, can be hard to create and/or remember. Password managers generate and securely store passwords so that consumers don’t have to remember them, but different ones offer slightly different services and levels of protection. Consumers who understand these features can choose one to meet their security needs. Link goes to: Top 10 Best Rated Password Managers What features matter most? What are different types of password managers?

The 25 Most Popular Passwords of 2014: We're All Doomed Well, that's an article title that caught my eye immediately.  I also thought that my passwords were not the best ever based on what tech friends have recommended.  Then I read this article.  Here are the top five used. 1. 123456 2. password 3. 12345 4. 12345678 5. qwerty My all time favorites on the list is trustno1 and letmein.  There are also the weird ones, like monkey and master.  Ultimately, if you are using any of these passwords, go change them.  Now.

For some reason, I have always thought that a password should be super-secretive and only understood by a few select individuals. When I first heard in a movie that the four most common passwords were "God", "Love", "Sex, and "Power" (which the below articles do not list as the four most common), I thought that those 4 words were very poorly-chosen passwords. Later, I learned that weak passwords involve many elements, including a lack of variation in capitalization or not using numbers and/or symbols. The below articles let you know what the weakest passwords you could pick are and how to make sure your password isn't easy to figure out. Top 20 most common passwords of all time revealed: ‘123456,’ ‘princess,’ ‘qwerty’ The top 500 worst passwords of all time If you find your password on one of these lists, I highly recommend changing it.