Kahney's Korner: Leander's Security Tips

Hi, I'm Leander, editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and this is Cane's Corner

I went out the other night to meet some friends at a bar, and I left my bag in the back of the car

Of course, two hours later, it was broken into, and my bag was stolen, with my laptop, an iPad, and a bunch of other stuff

including some checkbooks. This turned out to be a huge pain in the a**

So the biggest problem is that, you know, your computer is the repository of every single thing you do, and I did some things right

but I did some things wrong. This is where I'm going to tell you what I did right and what I did wrong. I came back to the car, and the back window had been smashed, and my backpack had gone, and the thing is I never leave

the backpack in the car, ever. I always take it with me, except, of course, when I go to a bar. When I got home, I

went to find my iPhone, which tracks all your machines, and here's one of the things I did wrong

I didn't have a really good, clear identifier for the iPad and for the MacBook that I stole

Everything was Leanna's MacBook, Leanna's MacBook, Leanna's MacBook, and, of course, I tend to get a new MacBook quite frequently

and I hadn't cleared out some of the old ones, so there was about four of them on there, and the same thing with the iPad, Leanna's iPad, Leanna's iPad, Leanna's iPad

and I couldn't tell which ones were the ones that I lost and which were the ones I still had in my possession

So I set it to wipe all of them. Because all the iPads and MacBooks had the same username

in the morning when I opened up my MacBook, the one I still had, it locked

So that was actually kind of good and reassuring, because I was like, okay, this is working now

So I unlocked it and tried to check in to see whether these, either of these devices have been connected to the internet

and this isn't actually as easy as it seems, because I wasn't really 100% sure if my iPhone was working properly

So the one thing I did do right is that I had turned on two-factor authentication for both of my email accounts

So I had it on for Google, and I had it on for iCloud, and I did this after reading Matt Honan's

Storytale of Woe and Why a couple years ago, when he was hacked and lost access to all of his

information. And it was because the first thing a savvy hacker does is they go in and they change your email password

And that, of course, email is used to reset all your other passwords

If you lose your password on Amazon or eBay, you request a new one and it gets sent to your email

So if you lose access to your email, you're really in trouble. But what I was really worried about was the browser, or browsers

I use Chrome and Safari, and of course, it's set up to remember all of my passwords. And here's one of the dumb things I did

One of my kids uses my MacBook for his homework, and he got tired of logging in with his 21-character password

I'd set up super secure, so he turned it off. Of course, it gets stolen, and as soon as they open it up, you know, if they fire up a browser, there it is

It's remembered all my passwords. So I spent the whole weekend monitoring carefully for my iPhone to see whether this iPad and this MacBook

connected to the internet. And I started to worry that it had been stolen by a savvy

crook who knew enough not to connect it to the internet, and that they would open up the browser and

somehow copy the passwords. Now, you know, that's probably, that's not possible because they can't copy it from the field

But still, I was paranoid. So I spent the entire weekend changing all of my passwords. And I've been a long-time one-password user, but I was kind of sloppy

You know, some of the passwords were easy to guess, and some of them, you know, I would use elite

So I put numbers instead of vowels. It wasn't the best security practice. So I spent an entire weekend changing hundreds of passwords

So my three security tips I learned the hard way from this was, one

you turn on two-factor authentication for everything, you know, especially for your email. Two, use a strong password

program like 1Password to generate these random strings of gibberish that are

unguessable. And definitely do not use the same password on any two sites, especially for important stuff. And number three, don't get your stuff stolen

Hey, that was Kenny's Corner, and I hope you learned something from my mistakes. Please follow us at Cult of Mac.com and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Cult of Mac

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