A cybersecurity expert says a recent password leak may have put your security at risk.
Reports say the leak is being called “RockYou2021″. Hackers exposed 8.4 billion passwords.
President of BeckTek Scott Beck says the bad guys will take this information and try to monetize it or use it elsewhere, “What I think we are going to end up seeing is password stuffing by organized crime groups that will attempt to try to mimic and be you, or we are going to see a lot of these spam emails and unsolicited text messages trying to get you to click on link to infect or steal identities even more.”
Beck says hackers will use the passwords as a gateway into your digital world.
His advice, “One mistake people often make is using the same password for all accounts. If one has been compromised, anything that is based around that password has been compromised. Any sites that allow for it, turn on that two-factor authentication, which means you have to enter your password and then you’ll get a code from your phone that you have to enter. The chances of the bad guys have both your password and access to your phone are pretty small, so that will help improve things.”
Beck also recommends, “You shouldn’t be using a word that can be found in the dictionary. The bad guys have something called ‘Brute Force Attacks’. It will just go through all of the words in the dictionary and they’ll swap out numbers for vowels. They’ll throw symbols at the end. It’s just software. It will just go through until eventually, they can break in.”
He says if it gets too confusing because there are so many different passwords, you can get password management software, “Then you just need to remember one password and the software can remember the rest for you, which will allow you to make very complex passwords for each site.”
