The thing that immediately struck me as odd was that I had seen her two nights prior and she hadn’t mentioned any world-wind trips to the Mediterranean. After a quick phone call, I learned that she wasn’t actually in Greece and she learned that her email account had been hacked. She then had to spend the rest of the day trying to convince her email provider that she wasn’t in Greece on vacation because the hacker had changed the password.

Since then I have gotten lots of email requests from friends and business associates who apparently found themselves in dire straits in far away places. Lucky for them, they only suffered the embarrassment of having to call everyone they knew explaining they had been hacked.

Why does this happen?

Three reasons, the first of which is easy — there are bad people out there with the tools and desire to hack your email account. Think about the information that has at one time or another moved through your email account and you can understand why it is an identity thief’s dream.

The next is that most people have really, really awful password. me123 is not a good password. The name of your dog, cat, first boyfriend or girlfriend, or the street you lived on growing up are also not good passwords. Adding your birthday to the end of your dogs name? Also not good. Hackers have programs that are very, very good at figuring out obvious passwords like these.

The last is that people tend to use the same password for everything. How many people reading this use the same password for their bank accounts and subscriptions to online newsletters? Do you think that CelebrityClothingMishaps.com really is that concerned about protecting your email and password information?

So what do you do?

First, don’t use the same password for everything. Think of each password like you would your social security number and think twice about who you are giving it to. If you are like most of us and can’t keep track of a different password for every site you go to, come up with a password for different classes of logins. One for your financial information, another for your email accounts, a different one for your Amazon account, etc.

Second, use better passwords. A good password should be at least seven characters long (ten is better) and contains numbers and letters, lower case and uppercase characters. It should not include a name, date of birth, or street address. So if me123 is bad, r33lgr34T is better. Is it harder to remember? Of course, but that is what makes it harder to guess and after you use it for a week your fingers will remember.

Finally, please always remember to leave some money, a credit card, and a photocopy of your passport in the hotel safe. Your friends will all sleep better knowing that you did.

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