In which I remind you to protect your data!

A co-worker just told me a story: While sitting in a restaurant with his wife over the weekend, his car was broken into. The thief got, among other things, his wife’s laptop, and on that laptop was a spreadsheet – unencrypted – containing their full names, SSNs, dates of birth, credit card numbers, the codes and online logins for all their credit cards, and all their account information. Their kids’ information – full names, SSNs, DOBs – was also included.

They drove like bats out of hell to a nearby rest stop, got on wi-fi with his laptop, and canceled all their accounts. But everything the thief would need to perform full-on identity theft for four people was in that spreadsheet.

The moral is this: don’t keep mission critical crap in unencrypted format on a portable machine! And if you must use a password database (which you should, since all of your online accounts should have different passwords), use an encrypted application and protect access to it with a very strong password — one with capped and lower-case alpha characters and numbers and special characters.

On the same co-worker’s advice, I use KeePass for all my secure information, and I keep it on a thumb drive. Once in a great while I print a hard copy and file it, but I don’t keep the info on my laptop.

Be safe, my babies. Because you really don’t want to spend an entire weekend – or two, or more – closing accounts, buying SSN protection, and then being financially crippled until your new checks and credit cards arrive.