Change your passwords and change them often
Posted Feb 28, 2014 7:39 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Calgary Police are warning the public to be vigilant and to change your online passwords one day ahead of the kick off to Fraud Prevention Month.
According to the experts, you should be changing them at least every two to three months.
Organized crime groups have become more sophisticated in their push to get at your personal information, fraudsters have stepped up their game so they want complacent Internet users to be wary.
Their warning comes as more and more groups begin to operate offshore, leaving law enforcement without any kind of recourse or action to take.
“In this world of electronics, complication and sophistication it seems utterly weird that we can use three words (change your password) like that and change the outcome of circumstances,” says Acting Staff Sergeant Dan Hoshwa of the Calgary Police Service Economic Crimes Unit.
Hoshwa says it’s far preferable to prevent yourself from becoming a victim than rather deal with the aftermath.
The Calgary Police add it’s also not a good idea to transit personal information by unsecured email, you should always use your own tablet or laptop when in a public area and be wary of unknown senders in your email account.
“Over the past three years, being in charge of this unit, we’ve seen a big increase in computer hacking and takeovers at the business level and the personal level,” says Hoshwa. “So each item that we consider to be unknown, we have to be careful with.”
When changing your password, you should also make it complex to make it more difficult to hack or break.
Often times investigators warn people are unaware of an intrusion in their computers of if someone has put a monitoring device inside their machine.
The advice comes from the Alberta Community Crime Prevention Association (ACCPA), a group of community stakeholders and police, that will be spearheading Fraud Prevention Month.
