BBB urges you to protect your online security this National Password Day
Posted March 15, 2019 10:20 am.
Last Updated March 15, 2019 10:21 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – You might have a tough time finding a Hallmark card for it, but today marks National Password Day.
The Better Business Bureau is hoping you’ll celebrate, by drastically increasing your cybersecurity.
The BBB has an easy tip: choose the top three accounts you wouldn’t want hacked, and change the passwords.
It says almost three quarters of us use the same one or two passwords for dozens of online accounts — with the average person having about 118 accounts, many of which sit virtually unused.
“After a while the accounts become dormant or inactive,” Karen Davis with the BBB explains. “You’re not paying attention to the activity that’s taking place on those accounts, and scammers start to take notice of the lack of activity on them and hack into them, and start using them to commit scams and frauds against other people. But it would be under your name.”
Identity theft is also a risk.
Davis adds most people tend to use the same password for all of their accounts, something she finds “pretty alarming.”
“Close to maybe about 80 per cent of people will just repeat the same passwords,” she explains. “In fact, when we’re doing our research, we notice that the average person will probably have two passwords and rotate those passwords for all of their accounts.”
She says it’s a good idea to close any accounts you haven’t used in over a year, and to, of course, change your passwords, making sure they’re strong and varied.
-With files from Kurtis Doering
