Make yourself (nearly) hack proof
TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR SECURITY. TIME TO SET IT UP.
WITH A RASH of recent hacks, your public accounts have become more vulnerable than ever. A hacked Twitter account (and there have been a lot of those recently) can lead to hacked Google accounts, LastPass accounts, Microso accounts and more. If you use a common password across sites, the hackers will try to use your email/password combination on all the major sites. ere are even easy tools to help them do this: an application called Shard, for example, will let hackers test dozens of sites with a given username and password combination at once.
One thing to combat this is good passwords, of course. A password manager is essential, both generating and storing good, unique passwords for each site. But a password manager isn’t the end of security: two-factor authentication (2FA) is also essential. is is a device or app that only you have access to and will be queried whenever somebody tries to access your account. So to log in, you need both the password and the device.
Commonly, SMS text messages are used as the second factor, but Google Authenticator is a great alternative for services that don’t support SMS or on devices that don’t have SMS (like Wi-Fi tablets). It works for your Google account, of course, but also for a host of other services, including LastPass, Wordpress, Dropbox and even Microso . Google Authenticator provides a rotating code for services linked to it, based on a unique key stored on your phone. It’s actually not very hard to set up or use, and it vastly increases the security of your services.