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Your password is the only thing between your
account and scammers - don't give it away!
When a scammer gets your password it's only the first step, usually people use the same password on numerous sites. The best example of this is ebay and Paypal, most people use the same password for both, the scammer therefore only needs to get your ebay password in order to gain access to your Paypal account. Below is a list of the most common passwords used - 10 - Your first name If your password is on that list then change it immediately! Also, don't have a pattern with your passwords. I remember
once I had the habit of using the web site name as the password! If a scammer
bothered to check then they would have worked out what my other passwords
were! I've been on the Internet since 1996 and in that
time I've been caught out twice by scammers. Both times I've been tricked into
giving criminals my account name and password. So I gave my account and password away for my
e-gold account. At the time there was $2.20 in it, that was instantly
transferred out. If a person knows your username they can then use
computer software to try to guess your password. It tries to achieve this by using every word in
the English language. If your password is an English word then it WILL be hacked. It doesn’t matter if it’s a common word, a persons name or a medical term – it will be found out. To circumvent this you need to make your password non legible; that could mean messing two letters up “mother = mohter” (okay), adding a number “mother = mother7” (good), jumbling up the numbers in the word “mother = mo1h3r” (great) or simply having a complete jumble of letters and numbers “hj34jui9” (best). For more security you should consider changing your password on a regular basis. At university we were forced to change our passwords every 6 weeks for security reasons; considering we had access to the Microsoft Windows source code (which I never did get to see) then you can understand why security was so high. Try not to use the same password on different web sites; if a low security
web site is hacked and your password is stolen then it will be used on other
web sites. Remember that having a person’s ebay account is only the first step in
scamming money and takes a lot of work, while having a paypal account is a
simple case of looting the funds. It’s
the difference of robbing a bank of cash or robbing a warehouse of electronic
goods in order to sell later - the bank is the easier option! |
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