So you go onto a new site to order a pair of jeans. You’ve never been on this site before but you know that they have the cheapest price on the jeans you want. So before you fork over your credit card information you have to give them an account name and password. They ask for your email so you give that to them and just for the convenience of your own head you make the password “pancakes” which is the same as your email password.
If you have done this then you are setting yourself up to be hacked. You gave a site you didn’t know the email password which can unlock a lot of personal information. And a guess is that if you were foolish enough to give up the password then you were foolish enough to put that same password for your banking information, bill consolidation site, your Facebook page, or anything else you can think of.
This is just one of the many ways that people get taken on the Internet. It’s unfortunate but it happens every single day. There are some simple things you can do to not be duped. First, make sure your password is set to something different each time. Whether it be just a couple of small changes in the password or something completely different. A great idea for the password is to simply make it the name of someone you know with a letter embedded in the middle of it. You can use a rotating cast of five relatively long names(short names may not be long enough to stand as passwords for every site). This way no matter what site you go to you can always remember your password with ease.
The other option is to download a password reminder as an application on your smart phone. You have to be careful with your passwords.
