3 Ways To Avoid Getting Hacked

Late last month, Brendan Iribe, Co-Founder and CEO of $2 billion Facebook-acquired virtual reality provider Oculus VR LLC, shocked the tech world by announcing his own replacement as leader of the gaming company. The announcement, published on his personal Twitter account, came as a complete surprise to Oculus employees and directors. He had named an unknown Twitter user as his successor. The response from the “new CEO” didn’t inspire confidence.

That’s because Iribe’s Twitter account was hacked. And he isn’t the only high-flying tech executive to have his account hacked: Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick have all seen their public social accounts hacked in recent months. Celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Sarah Silverman, politicians including Hillary Clinton and Congressman John Lewis, and athletes including Kevin Durant and Jameis Winston have all been hacked.

The security breaches aren’t limited to individuals. In 2015, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield exposed the names, birthdays, addresses, social security numbers, and other private personal and medical information for 80 million clients. In 2014, Staples exposed their payment system and compromised 1.2 million customer credit card accounts. Even our military’s US Central Command accounts were hacked by a group sympathetic to ISIS.

Despite the bleak picture painted by these examples, there are actions you can take and practices you can maintain to protect yourself and your company from being hacked. Following these three steps will protect your business and personal accounts from hackers:

1. Use a Password Manager to create, store, and share all of your passwords.

1. Popular and effective Password Manager applications include LastPass, 1Password, and the freely available KeePass. Offerings are available for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and browser-based web interfaces.
2. Store all of your passwords inside the Password Manager and never anywhere else! Never type your passwords in emails or in chat, never store them in Microsoft Office or Google Apps documents, or anywhere else other than in the password manager where they are well-encrypted and secured.
3. Only share passwords with people you trust to maintain the same password management discipline, and only share using the secure sharing features available in your Password Manager.

2. Create a completely unique password for each account

1. This way, if one of your passwords is compromised, it doesn’t help hackers gain access to any other account.

3. Use strong passwords

1. Password strength matters. A strong password will be at least 13 characters long and have a random distribution of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Shorter passwords, passwords that don’t use all the available character types, and short passwords that use real words are all more susceptible to hacking. Since the Password Manager creates and stores all your passwords automatically, you can easily create and use longer and stronger passwords.