This past weekend I went to visit my mom in North Carolina, so I found myself watching Dateline on NBC. Usually, I don’t have much time to watch any T.V., you know grad school probs. But I was intrigued by a story they were doing on a writer for Wired that got hacked and lost all of his passwords for all of his online accounts, including being locked out of his iPhone. It ended up that they were just trying to get hold his Twitter tag, @mat. Clearly by this simple Twitter name, this guy was one of the early adapters and plus his status of working for Wired, he was most definitely not ignorant about hackers and online security. One of the passwords that they were able to crack was 19 characters long with letters and symbols.

This news story got me to thinking about my own online identity security, and the pitfalls that I have when it comes to passwords and things. I was going to name steps that I was going to take to enhance my online identity, but then I realized that would also be giving step-by-steps about what accounts I have and what weaknesses they may or not have. So I’m just advocating for you to research and conduct your own online security analysis and find out what steps are best for you. As they stated on Dateline, it’s not like we can just quit the internet, but we can make the best out of the situation.