Happy New Year, Keepees! Welcome to the future.
January should be a month of fresh starts and optimism, but sometimes making resolutions can feel like more of a burden than anything else. The pressure to be better can take all the fun out of the New Year. Luckily, there’s one area of your life that you can vow to enhance without any self-denial, suffering, or—worst of all—hard work. What area is that? Your cyber life.
Protecting your identity is imperative, and yet luckily, extremely easy. Here are some ideas for simple New Year’s resolutions anyone can make to ensure they have a better, safer year.
1. Choose different passwords.
The biggest mistake anyone can make when using password-protected websites is to use the same login info for multiple accounts. While many sites are securely encrypted, others are not, and hackers might be just one low-security account away from gaining access to all of your most sensitive financial and personal data. While a different password for each account can be difficult to remember, a password manager like Keeper does the storing and organizing work for you. All of your data in one place makes having varied passwords, and staying one step ahead of hackers, easy as pie.
2. Choose strong passwords.
If you didn’t see it already, CNN recently published a round-up of the 25 worst passwords of 2012. All of the more expected contenders were there, like “password” and “12345,” but some more unusual suspects cropped up on the list as well. “Jesus,” “shadow,” and “trustno1” were our favorites, and good reminders that any one word, no matter how uncommon, is incredibly easy to guess. Instead, choose passwords with a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols, and that uses both lowercase and uppercase characters. Keeper’s random password generator makes this a cinch.
3. Back up your passwords.
What would happen if you lost your smartphone tomorrow? If someone found it, would all of your private and sensitive information—credit card data, social security number, banking info—pop up in a notepad application? Would it be lost to you forever? Don’t take that risk. Keeper Backup offers unlimited cloud storage for everything from security questions to personal memos. And now the Keeper Web App allows you to access those records from any device, so losing your phone doesn’t mean losing your identity.
Resolutions that will make your year better and are easy to keep? Done and…. done.