Using one password in multiple online locations is making you more “hackable”

If someone challenged me to gain unauthorised access to at least a dozen Facebook accounts by the end of this week, here’s one simple way I could do it:

I would create a fictitious award or competition. I would tell my FB friends — who love me so much — that I have been nominated for the “Global Impact Writers Award” and stand a chance to win 100,000 USD.

I would share a link for them to vote, and since they love me so much, they will rush to vote and even share the link to their timelines.

When they attempt to vote for me, they will get a prompt asking them to sign up first. The form would contain a few fields — “Name”, “phone number”, “email”, “password” and “confirm password”. Since they love me so much, they go through the stress of signing up to make sure their votes are locked in.

And just like magic, I would have access to at least a few Facebook accounts.

How?

By my very estimate, well over half of the people who will come across this post are using a single password almost every time they fill out a signup form online.

For some of you, the password for your phone unlock screen is the same as the password for all your banking apps and even the same for your Whatsapp two-factor verification. Others use the same password on their laptop, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, and anything that will take an alpha-numeric password.

What this means is that for a lot of people, asking them to sign up for something that requires them to sign up with a password is like politely asking “tell me the password you use everywhere”

I understand that life seems a lot easier with the convenience of using one easy-to-remember password that you use everywhere, but using password everywhere is like having the same key for your car, house, candy box and gym locker — the moment one gets access even to the least important of these, they get access to everywhere.

Even if you don’t fall for cyber schemes like the one I depicted, there’s a likelihood that once the security for one of the sites you use becomes compromised(and this happens more times than you know), you stand a significantly greater risk of suffering damage across multiple accounts.

Long story short, avoid using one password in multiple locations!

Adopting unique, strong passwords for each online account significantly reduces the risk of a widespread breach. While managing multiple passwords may require additional effort, the enhanced security is well worth the investment.

Tomorrow, I’ll share the tricks I use to come up with unique but easy-to-remember PINs and passwords for my accounts

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#StaySecure
#cst #cst2