It’s a reasonable question – if your password is strong, it shouldn’t matter…. right?
In 2013 Yahoo had a security breach that affected all 3 billion user accounts.
3 billion accounts. That’s 3 billion passwords. There probably weren’t even 3 billion people on the internet in 2013 – but there were that many Yahoo accounts. No doubt people had several Yahoo accounts for whatever reason.
And because of that breach, there’s now a database with all of those 3 billion usernames and passwords. In fact, you can check it (and every other major breach) out here: haveibeenpwned.com
That means that anyone (literally anyone) can take an email address and password pair and run it against any other website.. Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon, Paypal, your bank.
The low down
If you use the same password across all of your sites, you can quickly see how just one compromised password can give a malicious hacker access into all of your other accounts.
And hackers don’t do this manually – they do it using automated scripts, or “bots”. They can try millions of usernames & password combinations against hundreds of sites. If they find one that works, BOOM, they have something of value.
It’s not just Yahoo
Basically every large site, service or company has experienced some sort of security breach in its history.
Red Cross Blood Service in Australia
We’re not immune here in Australia. In fact, we’re the APAC leaders for data breaches!
What to do next?
Check out our top 3 Cybersecurity tips here.
Or if you need a team of specialists to do it for you, give us a call.
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