Greg's Corner

Data breach could potentially expose millions of email accounts

If you’re the type that doesn’t change their online passwords frequently, you may want to change your passwords today. It’s been reported that a massive amount of data known as ‘Collection #1’ has been floating around on the internet for a while and contains 773 million email addresses and 21 million passwords. The list itself is a few years old so if you’ve been using the same password for while you should probably go ahead and start changing your passwords on your online accounts.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dy-K3QbtYM%5D

Now you may think that you’ve probably changed your passwords since this data was collected. Well, there’s a reason this data dump has been called Collection #1. THat’s because there is a Collection #2 on the horizon which contains even more recently exposed data from within the past year. Collection #2 is said to have ten times the data that Collection #1 had. While we’re waiting for Collection #2 to hit the internet like a wrecking ball you can check to see if your email account was included in Collection #1 by checking your email address at Have I Been Pwned.

While you’re changing your passwords there are some good practices that everyone should follow. You should never use the same password for all of your online accounts. If you have trouble remembering all your passwords there are a plethora of secure password managers that will create and remember secure passwords for your accounts. If you are going to manage your own passwords don’t fall into the trap of using the most common passwords. You may think your clever by using ‘password’, ‘qwerty’, and ‘football’ as your passwords but you’re not fooling anyone. Instead, most security experts agree that passwords should contain no dictionary words, contain a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers and at least one non-alphanumeric symbol.

If a bad actor were to gain access to your email account they could wreak some fairly damaging havoc to your life since most of your online accounts are probably tied to that email address.