How To Protect Your Email and Personal Info

How to protect your email and personal info from being stolen is everyone’s concern. More so when an account like Reddit gets hacked, which it did last night. Every day, we hear about another massive data breach. Maybe the Russians hacking the DNC bothers you, or maybe not. But when it’s platforms where YOU have an account, like Yahoo, Reddit, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, and others, suddenly you pay attention. Here is a straightforward tip to avoid a security breach of your private information.

These days, everything is online. From a functional use basis, I can access my info anywhere, anytime. However, that also makes it more vulnerable to hacks and cyber thieves.

In the early days of the Internet, I was an AOL user, before broadband was even a thing. Yes, we were still using dial-up, can you imagine?

When new services started competing with AOL and Yahoo mail services, I almost deleted my account … but didn’t.

How To Protect Your Email and Personal Info

So now, while I have consolidated my business-oriented activities into as few profiles and accounts as possible, I still have that AOL account lying around. Having that account was handy with all the hacks over the last couple of years.

Use a secondary email account when you sign up for places like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.. Moreover, leave that email account as barren of information as possible. Should, God forbid, my AOL ever get hacked, there is nothing in there to worry about: it’s an empty account.

You can create an empty account at any number of places, such as Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc. Just remember to leave as many blanks as possible in the profile you set up.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it does push the hackers one step further away from your information.

How Not to Be Speared

How often have you gotten an email from a source you know?  Was it really from them? Another safety tactic is to resist the urge to click links you get in an email. It may seem harmless, like PayPal, GoDaddy, or your bank telling you they need you to update your account, or it will be locked. But when inspected closely, you’ll notice it’s not from support@thecompany, but rather [email protected] or some other closely named URL.

To be safe, go to the browser and log in directly. If there is an alert, it will show up there. If it doesn’t, someone was phishing and trying to spear you.

Read about the Reddit hack:

Also, check out how to avoid email scams