Secure Your Passwords

It’s happened to all of us. One minute, we are having the time of our lives, enjoying some retail therapy when BAM! You notice a weird charge on your credit card.

I was walking out the door of our home when I got an email from our credit card supplier letting me know that a transaction had just taken place. At first, I thought perhaps it was my husband, but when I didn’t recognize the shop – I gave him a call at work.

Me: Hey did you just spend $650 at Canada’s Wonderland? And what the fuck IS Canada’s Wonderland? (Me being a born and raised prairie girl and having been to Ontario once in my life, I had no idea that it was a place every kid dreams of).

Him: Um… no. And by the way, Canada’s Wonderland is like the Disney of Canada.

At that point, I knew we had been hacked. Earlier in the week, I had made some purchases on Amazon using the same credit card and not knowing any better, had been using the same recycled version of the password I had on everything. I knew I had to make a change then and there because getting a new credit card and updating it everywhere was a ginormous pain in the ass. And an inconvenience I didn’t want to have to relive ever again.

Keep in mind that this was long before I was working in the virtual realm. So I did what my mother would do and I got a tiny notebook and promptly started writing our logins into it and changing them to more secure versions.

Fast forward many years….

LastPass is my go-to encrypted password manager of choice. I love that the free version is all an ordinary person would need (although our team is on a premium version – but that’s only because of the volume of passwords that we need to share with each other for our work). I only have to remember one password now – and I made it easy for me to remember but so complex that no one would ever hack it easily.

The first Thursday of May is World Password Day. This year, why not give yourself the gift of security and take care of your passwords?