Hi, you may have heard of hackers getting into your systems or infiltrating your email account posing as you. I’m here today to give you a couple of tips on how to minimize that risk using things such as password manager and two factor authentication. Hi I’m Steve Conyers with CMIT Solutions and we provide cyber security and IT support for businesses and nonprofits. So the first of the two is a password manager. Personally, I use lastpass. But you can use any of that kind of a password manager and what they do is they make it so that you only have to remember one piece of information, the master password to lastpass and all your other passwords can be very complicated. As a matter of fact, I don’t even create them. I let lastpass generate very complex passwords of 10 to 12 characters with lightning bolts and exclamation points and all that kind of nonsense.
Then I don’t have to remember it. It fills it in for me when I go to a webpage or when I log into my email program. What that buys you is, frequently, just so that we can remember, we write down all our passwords. So we generate and use this same password across many different systems. And if you’re any, one of those systems gets compromised and sold out onto the dark web hackers, try to get into any system they think you might have like your bank account or your email account using the same password that you might have used in ESPN or something else like that. So it’s very important to have something that lessens your burden and let you not have to write down or use simple passwords. Now that being said, passwords are almost becoming passe’ in that.
Even with lastpass, I utilize something called two factor authentication. So that sounds really, really neat. And you may hear it. Some people globally call it two 2FA and basically what that means is that you have something that you have and something that you know, in order to get into a system. So the thing that you have typically is your cell phone. I was going to reach for it, but I don’t know what I did with it. And there’s a code that’s on your phone and the password that you remember to sort into lastpass again. With two-factor authentication there are a couple of applications I use like the lastpass two-factor authenticator and it generates a code every 20 or 30 seconds for all important things that I sign into such as banks and things like that. So if you want to protect yourself from these online scams and protect your email and your other logins use a complicated password, helped by a password manager and two factor authentication so that even if someone knows your password, they cannot get into your system. If you find this useful look around my website or connect with me on LinkedIn, you can see things like white papers and security articles to download here. Again, my name is Steve Conyers with CMIT Solutions, and I hope you have a wonderful, secure and safe day.