While this article isn’t specifically about SL, it’s about keeping yourself safe from hackers on your computer, which is indirectly SL related.

I saw a news report this morning on TV from Mike Wendland who writes a tech blog called PC Mike. This caught my attention this morning, because he was talking about hackers. The news reports lately are full of the story about the Russian hackers who have hacked billions of websites, stealing logins and passwords. The solution? They recommend you change your login ID and password for every website you use.

Really?

I don’t know about you, but that is very, very daunting. I have a LOT of logins to a LOT of websites; I honestly don’t even know if I could find every single website for which I have a login.

One of the best ways to thwart hackers is to use long, complicated password like KQo=3oyB>VG^-6 or something like that. The experts tell us that in addition, we should have a different password for each site. I don’t know about you, but there is no way I could remember that many passwords, let alone a password like my example above.

So what do most of us do? We write down our logins and passwords, either in a document on our PCs or *gasp* a piece of paper in a drawer. Even though we know that is not a good idea and very unsafe, what else do you do? PC Mike reported on some online login and password managers on his most recent blog post.

PC Mike recommends that the first thing users need to do is use a password management program, such as Last Pass, Password Genie, and Dashlane.

Last Pass is an online program that manages all your passwords. It keeps track of your user names and passwords for you and logs in automatically with them. It creates passwords the way they would be… very complex. The program will generate these kinds of secure passwords.

Password Genie is another secure password manager. It stores and secures passwords on PC and Mac computers and Apple and Android smartphones and tablets.

Dashlane has a form filler, generates secure passwords and has a very easy to use interface. Like the others, there are free and premium versions.

Here’s a video:

PC Mike is a veteran journalist whose video “PC Mike” reports have been distributed weekly to all 215 NBC-TV stations since 1994, making him one of the most experienced tech reporters in the country. His tech stories and videos have appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, the Today Show, The New York Times, USA Today and in numerous national newspapers and magazines. In addition to the PC Mike tech blog, he also publishes the Roadtreking.com RV Travel Blog in which he travels North America in an RV reporting about interesting people and places.

My only question is…what if hackers hack into the login and password websites?? That way they would have instant access to every single one of your logins and passwords from one hack. PC Mike is a well-respected tech journalist, so I believe that he wouldn’t recommend something that wasn’t safe. But really, is anything safe online anymore? I would definitely do more research about how and why it’s safe to have a login and password manager.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager