According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, hackers were able to retrive more than 13 million sensitive records this year alone.  Unfortunately, most companies or people do not know the extent of what has been taken.  Take the following precautions to help avoid this misfortune.

  1. Always keep your firewall, anti-malware and antivirus software up-to-date.
  2. Be sure to pick passwords that are very strongly coded.  Use upper and lower case letters, numbers punctuation marks and symbols.  NEVER use common words or names.  There are free programs out there that will generate and store all of your log-in credentials on your personal computer.
  3. If one account has been compromised, act like they all have been and watch over all statements.  If your Social Security number has been taken, be sure to place a security freeze on your credit report.
  4. Be sure to be surfing the web using https://.  Also, try to not use public Wi-Fi to log into sensitive accounts.
  5. Don’t be a clicker…bad things can happen when you click on a suspicious download or pop-up.

Just take a few extra steps to save yourself some major headaches!!