Your trading account has some very valuable information in it. There is your personal information like your address, phone number, birthday and even your social security number. On top of that, there may be your bank account numbers and other sensitive financial information.
If hackers get into your account, they could change your payment information and have a check sent to their address instead of yours. Or even worse, the could steal your identity and start getting credit cards in your name.
So how do you prevent this? There are a few simple measures that you can take, but most of them center around keeping your online passwords safe.
Most people are very lax when it comes to choosing a secure password and even more careless about where they store their passwords. I will address these issues one at a time and hopefully by the end of this article you will be convinced to make some changes to beef up the security of your accounts.
The first step is to choose a secure password. Too often, people choose the name of their spouse, child or pet. Another popular one is their birthday or something equally as obvious.
Choosing obvious passwords is not only easy to guess by humans, but easy to crack by computers. What many password cracking programs do is guess your password from a list of frequently used words. This usually means all lower case or all upper case. For example, if you use ‘sally’ as your password, that would be very easy to guess.
When creating a password, you should mix lower case, upper case, numbers and symbols. This creates the most secure password possible. In addition, you should make your password at least 10 characters long. This makes it even harder for people to crack your password.
Now we come to where you store your password. No matter how secure your password is, it doesn’t matter if others can easily access your password. Two common mistakes are putting passwords in a file in their computer or storing their password in their browser.
When storing a password on their computer, people often put it in an Excel document or a regular Notepad file. If any one is able to get into your computer, they could easily search for “password” files and the password file could be copied. Do not do this!
The next common mistake is to store passwords in their browser. If anyone gets access to your computer, the person would just have to open a browser and the passwords would automatically be filled in. That is not good at all.
So what is the solution? You could purchase a password manager for your computer. They are very inexpensive and store all of your passwords in a secure file. You just need one super-secure password to open the program and you will have access to all of your passwords.
In addition, the password manager can generate secure passwords for you every time you create a new account or if you want to change an old password. Check them out, they are totally worth the money.
Hugh is an aspiring trader and blogger. Check out more of Hugh’s tips and see his password manager review on his blog.
Jerk.
