Cult of Mac: "Your biggest online security mistakes (and how to avoid them)"

Image c/o Cult of Mac and Scott Schiller

From the Cult of Mac site, an article worth reading if you want to protect yourself when buying things online: Your biggest online security mistakes (and how to avoid them).

"We all make compromises daily when it comes to online security. Everybody wants to be safe and secure when making purchases online, but practically none of us do everything necessary to keep our data secure."

It's not specific to Mac users, these lessons are important for everyone who operates online regardless of the type of computer they use.

They are:

• Don’t reuse user names or email addresses
• Use secure payment systems (not credit cards)
• Only shop secure websites
• Stop using simple passwords

That last one is particularly important. I know it's frustrating and irritating but passwords need to be complicated. Every additional character can make it up to 80 times harder to crack if you use upper and lower case characters, numbers and some of the weird symbols you can find on your keyboard. If you make your password 16 characters long rather than 8 and use all the extra possible characters you can make your password billions, trillions or quadrillions of times harder for a cybercrook to crack.

So instead of using a password like "watchdog" choose something like "Consum9rW#tchd0g" and you might save yourself a LOT of bother, heartache and money.