Recently after the security breach at Epsilon Marketing, people are asking themselves if their information is really safe online and how much information should you store online? What kind of risks are there for keeping your information online?
What I always recommend people do is have several different complexity levels of passwords online. I myself use 3 different complexity levels of passwords for all my online activity. Your highest complexity password (8 characters long and 3 character types) should always only be used for online banking information and credit cards. Next you should have a medium complexity password for your online accounts such as email and facebook. Lastly, we all have sites we are a member of but don't quite understand why we have to have a username and password for the site, for these silly sites, such as forums and blogger sites, I recommend a third password also of medium complexity (6 characters long and 2 character types).
How should you maintain your passwords for all your different sites? Using a free service like Lastpass can help remember all your different passwords for you and it encrypts them and saves those encrypted passwords behind one master password which is the "last password" you should ever have to remember.
Lastly what should you do when something like the Epsilon Marketing security breach occurs? Depending on the level of your information that was exposed, you may need to go to your password complexity level which was breached and change all the passwords in that level. In the case of the Epsilon breach only email addresses and customer names were exposed so password changes aren't necessary, so everyone is off the hook this time, no password changes are necessary but you do need to keep an eye out for suspicious emails claiming to be your bank asking for more information now that email scammers may have your email address! So be careful out there.
