Are you taking steps to protect your personal information online? 100% protection is, to be completely honest, impossible. However, there are steps you can take to shift the possibility of your personal information falling into the wrong hands from “likely” to “very unlikely.”

To put online security in simple terms: Let’s suppose a burglar wanted to go through your house and take everything of value. We’ll pretend you have a giant house with sturdy doors you keep locked at all times. Your possessions are still vulnerable to a thief who goes around breaking into houses with a crane and wrecking ball, but it’s unlikely that you’ll encounter such a thief. Your main concern is to keep your stuff safe from regular thieves just trying to make a quick score. In order to do that, you simply need to make it more difficult and time-consuming to break into your house than any comparable house in the neighborhood.

Here are a few tips to help you make life difficult for information thieves online:

1. Use a different password for each account

This one might seem like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most commonly overlooked ways of improving security online. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of “new stuff” and use the same password for multiple platforms. However, doing so is dangerous because attackers need only break into one of your accounts to access all of them.

2. Avoid passwords consisting of real words

Be creative and mix things up with passwords that include letters, numbers, symbols, and varied capitalization. Thieves aren’t very good at guessing passwords that don’t make sense. Use this to your advantage and avoid passwords that include words you’d find in a dictionary or combinations of your name and birth date or phone number.

3. Manage your passwords in an offline document

Think of this document as a secret box that contains a key to every room in your house. If you can protect the document with a password, all the better! Reduce the chances of your document being found by naming it something completely un-passwordish. “Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening” is a good name. (Hackers find Robert Frost quite boring.)

If you prefer an added level of security, write your passwords down on paper and keep them separate from your computer. One of my programmer friends keeps a list of all his passwords on a piece of paper in his desk. He’s made daily password changes a part of his morning ritual by changing the password of each program as he signs in for the first time that day. Each new password is written on a piece of paper and locked in his desk at the end of the day. In order to directly access those passwords, a hacker would need to enter the office building where my friend works, break into his office, and pry open the desk drawer. Is his approach on the extreme side? Yes. But so is his need to keep important information secure.

4. Answer security questions with silly answers

Many platforms offer a secondary level of safety in the form of security questions. Most of them ask for your mother’s maiden name, the name of a childhood pet, or the name of a favorite teacher. The real answers to those questions are often only a few guesses away. As such, the key to a security question’s strength lies in your ability to choose what the platform will take as a “correct” answer. If you think a hacker would have trouble guessing that the correct answer to, “What is the name of your favorite teacher?” is “OlarbearP37!” you’d be right.

5. Keep important files on a detachable drive

The logic is simple: if it’s not on a computer with web access, a hacker can’t steal it. This method won’t protect your data from absentminded behavior or physical theft though. Musician Imogen Heap recently ran into issues with her data protection plan when she lost a detachable hard drive containing many of the music files needed for her upcoming album. The hard drive turned up two weeks later when she went to wash a load of laundry and found the drive in the bottom of her laundry basket. =)

The Bonus Round:

• Make a habit of checking the URL before entering your password on a site. (Protect yourself from sites pretending to be a legitimate site just to get your information.)
• Lifestreaming is fun but there’s no need to tell people when you’re leaving your house for a few hours. (There’s such a thing as too much transparency.)
• If you wouldn’t do something in real life, don’t do it online. (Advice about following your heart and throwing caution to the wind rarely serves one well online.)

Remember, if a password is easy for you to recall, it will be easy for a hacker to guess.

I know it might seem really boring and tedious to go about switching passwords and moving documents. But information theft is very real and the little bit of time and energy it takes to secure your data online is well worth your effort.

If you have any thoughts, tips to add, or would like to correct me on something, I’d appreciate your input. Thanks, and stay safe!

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photo: mirkomakari