Topic: Personal data security

[scottws]

Over the past three days, I have received e-mail alerts from three different organizations that my e-mail address was compromised:  AbeBooks.com, Best Buy, and I forget the other one.

In all cases, luckily it was just my e-mail address but this is crazy!

I just don't think we can trust anyone to really be secure.  Think of all those small Internet shops.  Do you think they are using third party services to audit their data access.  I can guarantee you that virtually none of them are and they probably would never even know data got compromised.

[Cools!]

I agree. Most of the small shops are setup and forget, they [the owners or developers] rarely keep up with the security updates. There's no such thing as perfect software.

I have multiple email address for different things and use only specific credit cards so if something happens I can quickly track it down.

I think people need to be a lot more concerned about their security. Like picking good passwords, using different emails, double checking every service they use, etc.

[Cobra951]

Yeah, that's what I do too.  I typically use my gmail acct, which is under an alias anyway, to register for all the garden-variety sites.  But I use my main MSN acct to register for more serious purposes, like job searching.  Well, I got an email today from Robert Half about a security breach that leaked out my email address.  So yeah, this is an annoyance, at the very least.

[scottws]

I was using my main Gmail account for everything and almost everything I registered for used my standard password.  It occurred to me more than once that all someone had to do was to basically try my submitted e-mail address and password I registered with on my Gmail account and they would basically be me.

That all changed when that Gawker user account list was stolen.  I now have different passwords for almost every site and I use a password generator to generate a secure password for each one.  There is no way I can remember them, so I use an encrypted password database program (KeePass Password Safe) to store them and that is protected by my standard password and also a key file.

This is actually really annoying because I will go to log into Facebook or LinkedIn or something and not have the password database handy.  But hey at least I'm pretty secure now.

[W7RE]

I keep several different passwords. Some are for games and such, then I have better ones for more important things. (By "better", I mean longer, less readable, and not used elsewhere) Some of the game ones overlap each other, but I'm much more careful about the others.

[shock]

I use a few different ones.  There's a basic one for sites I generally don't care about, and then they get increasingly complicated for things I actually care about. Highest security goes to my gmail one.  I also used to the same password for everything until I thought about it...

It gets confusing at times, but I can keep most of them straight.

[Ghandi]

My password is password. No one will ever guess it.

[ren]

I have 5 or 6 passwords in circulation that I periodically add a few characters too.

The only thing that's really at risk is my credit card information. I'm hoping that if anything ever does happen that it's something the card company takes care of relatively painlessly. My whole life is online but I don't really have anything I'd consider confidential or private out there.