Hacks happen almost on a daily basis by now – and no company is immune. Be it smaller ones or industry giants, the threat is real for everyone. That’s something even Dell noticed when they got hacked beginning of this month.
The target: Customer information
According to their press release the target of the cybercriminals was apparently to steal customer information. They said that they detected an unauthorized activity on their networks that tried to extract information like names, email addresses and hashed passwords.
Luckily Dell was able to disrupt the attempt pretty fast – they state that no information was actually stolen. On top of that they also hired a digital forensic firm to conduct an investigation and informed the authorities as well as customers.
Change your password nonetheless
Even though apparently no information was stolen Dell reset the user passwords to limit potential exposure of their customer’s information. In order to create a safe password here are a couple of tips for you that you might want to consider:
- Use a unique password for each of your accounts. When a website gets hacked one of the first things bad guys do is checking out if your username/email address/password combination works on other (high-profile) pages.
- Your password should consist of at least twelve characters – the more the better. It should include upper- and lower-cases, numbers, and special characters.
- Try and create passwords that can’t be found in a dictionary. Hackers nowadays have programs that cycle through dictionaries to check if they can access your account.
- Don’t use character strings like 12345, abcde, qweertyui, etc.
- Use passwords that can’t be associated with you: Your dog’s name, birthday dates of family members or yourself or your favorite sport are a not a good idea.
- Change your password regularly – especially when it comes to your email and online banking/online payment accounts.
- Don’t write down your passwords and never ever share them.
If you have trouble coming up with a good, strong, and complex enough password you can always use a good Password Manager to help you out.
But eventually, you’ll have to eventually write down your passwords somewhere if you have accounts on many sites…
That or you use a password manager – something we would recommend to do no matter what.