I must admit that I am a Internet junkie.

• I pay most of my bills on-line.
• I get most of my news on-line. 
• I purchase a lot of goods and services on-line.
• I follow friends on Facebook
• I get and receive many emails daily

As a result of all this activity I have a lot of logins and passwords strewn across the Internet. I also must admit that until recently I had not really taken my many account passwords very seriously. That changed about a month ago when I discovered that someone had gained access to one of my accounts and had ordered some pretty expensive equipment.  The perpetrator had not managed to change my shipping address so I guess the hack was more for a thrill than for material gain. After several weeks working with the company I managed to get the purchases and their corresponding charges removed and now the account it back to its normal charges.  Of course one of the first things I did was to change the password on the account to make it much harder to break.

I’m pretty sure I am not alone in being lazy with my Internet accounts. It is just easier to remember a simpler password than making it harder to break. I picked up one of the password generating and storage software programs that are available. With some work I am now pretty sure my accounts are much more secure than they once were.  So, my advice to all you seniors out there is to take your security info seriously. It will save you many hours later on.

This incident has not scared me away from the on-line world but has made me more aware of potential problems.

And the journey continues….