Whenever I want to feel fearful and depressed I usually visit one of the news websites. Earthquakes, murder, war, theft, snoops, kidnappers, recession, depression, corruption, and all other sorts of horrible news. When I read the news sites I’m reminded of how unsafe the world is. Soon I tire of the bad news and move on to investigate the net for news on tech and design. Today Foxnews.com had the audacity to remind me that I am unsafe even on the web. The site highlighted the news from Microsoft that thousands of Hotmail passwords had been exposed. It scared me to death. I nearly jumped to my Hotmail account before I even finished the article. Reading on I discovered that Microsoft had deactivated all the affected accounts until true control could be restored. Why do I care? Hotmail only collects my spam from sites that demand an email address. Hotmail lets through all the other spam anyway! But I digress.

The point of all this is: we are never safe. Their is no safe haven in the world or the web.  Every company does it’s best and so must we.  Yet, sometimes problems may come. If we live with that understanding we can truly do our best to protect ourselves. When we react in panic there is not a clear path of thinking. So with this reminder of our web-identities fragility, what should we do? Let’s refresh four basic email and online account rules:

1. Always use a secure password. Your birthday, name spelled backwards, address, mothers name, dog’s name, middle name, favorite food, and initials hardly qualify. Use one of the many free random password generators on the web or if you insist on an easier to remember one then create a mixture of information that you can remember. For example and purely fictitious: !S1eP99t9 This could be a combination of the month and year you and your spouse were married. Now while I would only call this a basic password it sure beats “Fluffy”. Of course if you want your bank account to be protected by Fluffy, then more power to you.
2. Never use the same passwords for multiple accounts. For that matter don’t do what I did at the start and use the same password with just the last letter different! Why would you want someone to have a free-for-all with all your accounts? Use different passwords and find an open-source or free password vault. I personally love 1Password for the Mac.
3. Change your passwords periodically. I must admit it takes the misfortune of someone to remind me to do this.
4. Don’t use a public computer. Many public computers are not adequately protected against the installation of malicious password key logging applications. Just don’t log in on a public computer. Just say no. And certainly don’t buy something online with your credit card information! Browse the web on it, read the news, just don’t give any information.

I understand these are basic tips, but sometimes we just need to be reminded to stay alert and on guard.  Kind of like reminding our kids to wear their helmet when they ride a bike.  Resist the urge to become lazy online. I don’t want to read about you on Foxnews.com.