Public Service Announcement – How to check to see if your password has been stolen.

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to give you all this quick public service announcement. At our annual conference this year we learned of all the ways that the cyber criminals can steal your passwords and potentially cause you all sorts of problems. Below in maroon is the website where you can see if you have been compromised, and also there is a link to set up “Two Form Authentication” (2fa) for just about any website in which you have entered a password.

Please take a moment and secure your personal and financial information by setting up 2fa using the instructions below.

Sincerely,

Gary Smith

For those of you who attended our conference, we will soon be making the cybersecurity presentation available.  I heard a number of jaws hitting the floor as we learned the extent of the cybersecurity problem, and the ways the criminals can leverage and monetize the information they steal.  For those of you who were not able to attend, here is a Reader’s Digest version.

1. Your passwords have probably already been stolen because other companies (not us) have been hacked.  If you use the same password for multiple sites, the bad guys have your information and just haven’t used it yet.

Do you think you’re safe?  Go to https://haveibeenpwned.com and seee which of your passwords were stolen in other companies’ breaches.

2. You should not re-use passwords.  The bad guys will take the passwords they stole in #1 and try your LinkedIn password on your online banking site.  They’ll be able to answer the security questions because they logged into your Facebook account with that same password and looked up where you grew up!

3. 2 factor authentication (2FA) is something you know (password) + something you have (a physical token, a code that gets sent to you by text message, or the Authenticator or similar app on your phone).  We require 2FA on the Cantella portal to protect your clients’ information, and almost all popular websites (social media, personal email, banking, etc.) support it as well.  This is the single best protection you can employ to protect your information on both personal and business sites. 

https://www.turnon2fa.com/tutorials/ walks you through how to enable 2FA for popular websites in minutes.  The most popular sites are listed first, and others are shown by category at the bottom.