The relentless growth of Cybercrime

I'm sure many of you have had this feeling before, as it is something that is happening more and more often in our modern world. That feeling when you wake up, about to log onto your reddit account and this appears:

Many of you would think "what's the big deal, it's just a reddit account, it's not worth anything." That's true but one similarity it has to my Steemit account is that its like a ledger (although centralized) of my activity, thoughts, ideas, comments I've had, posts I've shared and everything in between for a very long time. It has a whole different set of value to me and it would feel like a big part of my past would get stolen from me.

There is a sense of panic that ensues, "what do I do now?" I clicked on the account-activity link and it showed that someone had logged in from the U.S with "Organization" EGIHosting which I'm guessing is a VPN of some sort. Thankfully this had triggered the reddit account to get locked so it wouldn't be abused.

I quickly requested an email to reset my password, the email appeared instantly and I used a password manager this time around and a very long and randomized password (Steemit password generator has taught me well). I can really recommend everyone to use a password manager, though. Ever since I've started I've never had any issues with all the accounts credentials that are stored there.

A short google description of a password manager:

Password managers store your login information for all the websites you use and help you log into them automatically. They encrypt your password database with a master password – the master password is the only one you have to remember.

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Here is a meme I just created to help you make the decision! :P

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Hacking is something that is becoming a bigger issue day by day as the world is relying on their online activity and networks for their credentials and monetary value. From a quick google search this image from this source shows what American's are mostly worried about:

You also have to remember that most of your passwords and credentials are all saved locally somewhere, making it easy for attackers to target them or steal many in a bunch which happens very often. This is something I also am excited about to see how cryptographic solutions will influence in the future and how much safer they will make it for accounts not to be so called "brute forced" or hacked through other ways that rely on a centralized storage.

Hacking is becoming a real problem in the world, people, organizations, not even countries are safe from it. The bigger issue it gets the more demand there will be for a "better way" to deal with these.

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In conclusion, keep your passwords safe and make sure they are strong. Losing access to your account due to hacking sucks! Thankfully I didn't lose my reddit account today and I can sleep better knowing its safer now. :)