Company XYZ is reporting a breach of 50 million customer’s personal/financial/medical data..

Jane Doe has her email hacked, private photos stolen and bank account compromised..

You’ve probably heard and seen it in the news many times now and this will continue to get more frequent with greater severity. I am talking about sensitive personal and financial data being breached or hacked into via personal and company/organization computers and accounts.

Although you can’t directly implement or enforce what large companies have in place in terms of security measures over your personal data, you can take important steps to secure your own data as much as possible. It’s not that hard and you’ll be glad that you did.

How I use to store login usernames and passwords before:

Like most people, I used a basic text editor (ie. Notepad), Microsoft Excel, or paper/notebook to store my login details. Terrible, terrible idea.

All the information is not organized, not secured, not encrypted, and not backed up! Aside from the obvious security issues, managing hundreds of login details for me and my clients became a nightmare using traditional methods.

How I store login details and other sensitive personal/financial data now:

I now use a software/app called 1Password – developed by AgileBits, Inc. (a Canadian company based out of Toronto). And, I love it!

You can install it on your Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android phone/tablet devices and have all your data synced across all devices so you can access it easily.

The data is encrypted and you can reference your logins by entering in a master password to “access the 1Password vault”.

Instead of using a weak password (ie. raptors456) that hackers can use brute force to guess/decipher, 1Password can generate super strong passwords like: dvACKXB+YToVc#Zm. Don’t worry, you don’t need to type this in manually, you can use their easy copy/paste function or their browser extension to automatically fill in the login details when you visit a website.

 

I very highly recommend that you check out 1Password. They have a 30-day free trial, but I can 100% guarantee that this is a no-brainer one-time purchase that will save you time and headaches!