Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I know this much.
I know I’m doing better than Dropbox is doing today.
Why?
Because Dropbox says they weren’t hacked.
If you’ve got to go out there and say we weren’t hacked, you might have a problem
because some people say they were hacked.
Other people say they were hacked.
Was it hacked?
Wasn’t it hacked?
I don’t know and to be honest, I don’t really care.
This is what we call, in my game, a learning opportunity.
This is a chance for us to have a quick conversation about security and password protection.
Oh yes, we are returning to that topic today on DottoTech.
Were they hacked?
Weren’t they hacked?
Who cares?
I really couldn’t care less whether or not Dropbox got hacked because even if Dropbox
wasn’t hacked, there’s a good chance at some point that Dropbox is going to be hacked
or somebody that I use that’s just as important to me as Dropbox will be hacked.
I cannot rely on anybody else to protect my personal information and nor should you.
That’s the topic of today’s video.
I’ve returned to this a few times and I will return to this a few more times.
So if you are a subscriber to our channel, you have to know that this is a message that
we will return to again and again whenever the opportunity presents itself.
But look at the story and imagine how devastating this could be.
Business Insider says nearly 7,000,000 Dropbox passwords has been hacked.
That’s because somebody’s telling the world that they’ve got 7,000,000 passwords
from Dropbox.
Dropbox is saying that that that did not happen.
I tend to believe Dropbox in this case, that they probably weren’t really hacked, that
the addresses came from somewhere else and somebody is trying to take advantage but time
will tell.
We will know in the next few days.
Regardless of what happens over the next few days, the content that I want to share with
you now on this video I think will still be valuable and that is this: If you have a Dropbox
or any cloud-based account and you use the same password on multiple accounts, you’re
in trouble because at some point, something bad could happen.
Now there’s no guarantee something bad is going to happen.
There’s just a chance that something bad will happen so you have to take some steps
to protect your own privacy and your security because bottom line is all of these major
services that deliver content to us, that deliver services to us, they are all targets.
They are all under constant attack, which means that our personal information, our passwords
and our security is under constant attack.
Now they’re the first line of defense.
Their own security measures are the first line of defense and they should hold.
But should they fail, then we need to have our own levels of security and I choose to
use a password manager.
Now there’s a variety of them out there.
I’ve done a video which I’m going to share with you.
I’m going to put a link right over my shoulder to LastPass.
This will walk you through the process of installing and using LastPass.
Now I don’t care if you use LastPass, or KeyPass or 1Password.
I don’t care if you have some other system that you have some other system that you have
that can make you come up with really cryptic and difficult to understand passwords.
I just care you’re using multiple passwords, not the same password on multiple accounts,
and that they are difficult to hack.
They aren’t common words and that when something like this happens, you have the facility to
go in and change them.
Most especially, I hope you don’t have one master password that gives everybody the key
to everything should they gain access to your email account and password and put those two
together.
That is a worst case scenario.
So what do you have to do?
Well, what I did.
The first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to go into Dropbox.
Regardless of whether or not they say that they are safe or not, you want to go into
Dropbox.
You want to go in your Settings in Dropbox.
You want to go in your Security in your Settings in Dropbox and you want to change your password.
Put in your old password, create a new password.
Now when I did this, I used my password tool.
I used LastPass to do this because I use LastPass for all of my password stuff.
I’ll just quickly show you—I might have to blur some things out here—I chose my
Dropbox and I went in and I edited the password.
I went in and I went into Edit where I could go in and change the password.
I checked it, I went in, I had LastPass create a new password for me and then I saved it.
I actually didn’t even do it on this desktop computer.
I did it on my notebook computer but that password because of how LastPass works on
all of my different browsers and all of my different systems, then carried through and
allowed me to log in to Dropbox even from this browser a little bit later.
It’s a system which is not perfect.
People are going to say what happens if LastPass gets hacked?
Yes, what happens if LastPass gets hacked?
Well, LastPass has some measures in place that separate your account information, your
email address and your accounts from the passwords so theoretically we’re going to be fine
but I can’t 100% guarantee it.
But what I can guarantee is it’s an awful lot better having my passwords here then it
is having them in a text file on my desktop or having a single password that I use over
and over again.
I hate kind of being the guy that always says change your passwords, be safe but change
your passwords.
Be safe.
Protect your privacy and take care of yourself.
That’s the message today.
I hope you found this video to be useful, if somewhat preachy.
There are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is to subscribe to our channel.
The second is to sign up for our newsletter, where I will be talking about making sure
you are safe and your passwords in this week’s newsletter.
And the third is DottoTech is a community-funded channel through the services of Patreon.
If you want to know more about what being part of our community involves, which includes
giving us some money so that we don’t have to get advertising money to help us keep getting
content flowing—it’s a little as a dollar a month.
It’s not a huge amount of money—I encourage you to visit our Patreon site and take a look.
That’s it today.
I am done with my severe messaging to you.
Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!