Today I learned a very important lesson in life. The lesson that I learned today was that you must make sure that all your information is secure. I was recently a victim of a cyber attack in which someone tried to withdraw money from one of my accounts. I always hear about people’s information getting stolen and always thought that it couldn’t happen to me. Turns out that I was wrong, very wrong.

Most of people have at least two locks on their doors, one regular lock and a deadbolt lock. If you feel secure with two locks why have only one “lock” for our digital accounts. The one “lock” we have on our digital accounts is a password that most do not remember. The password is fine and dandy but can easily be broken into no matter how “secure” you believe it is. My password for the account that was hacked was 15 characters long and a pass-code that I had never used before. The funny thing is that the email that I use for the account has a 2-step authorization setup. The only problem is that I never enabled it on any account other than my email accounts. If I would have taken five minutes out of time to set it up for 2-step authentication then I would have saved myself a ton of time and frustration.

Before you bring out the pitchforks and try to burn me at the stake, just take a step back and listen for a bit more. If you have a smartphone, then you are halfway to having true security on your accounts. The app that I personally use on my phone for 2-step authentication is Google Authenticator. If for some reason you do not like Google then there are many other options from big developers such as Microsoft. I’m not trying to tell you to go out and purchase a life lock subscription or anything. All I am recommending is that you try out a 2-step authentication method. A password or a pin was sufficient in the past but so were chip-less debit and credit cards. Why wait until cyber security is fully needed, act now and save yourself the trouble. I was lucky because I was able to find out within an hour, but will the next victim be as lucky.

Protect yourselves,

Josh R.