It started with an email from a friend two years ago that went some­thing like this “I’m stranded in Greece and my wal­let has been stolen. I really need your help as I’m des­per­ate and don’t know what to do. Can you to send $2000 as quickly as you can?” Infor­ma­tion about where to send the money fol­lowed. It was well writ­ten, from her email account, and used my name explicitly.

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.