Identity Theft Awareness

Password maintenance is a pain.  Anyone active on the network knows how difficult it is to keep track of passwords.  The temptation is to keep the same password for everything and keep it simple.  I've found that a service called Lastpass.com is a way to manage passwords with one login.  It helps, but isn't perfect. Did you know that the most common password is "Password1"?  (Oops -- did I just guess your password?)  Read this very interesting article on the topic of password complexity. The Lastpass.com site I mentioned above allows you to generate very complex passwords for your various sites, then it keeps track of those complex passwords for you.  Pretty handy, really, unless you need to manually enter those passwords.  An alternative I've used is to create a password that has something static and something that varies, but both are easy to remember yet hard to guess.  Let me explain. Take a phrase that describes something about yo...

JSOnline, a Wisconsin "paper" included this article March 5, 2012.  I'm including the full article. =============== Tax time has a reputation for being almost universally stressful. As the looming April deadline closes in, Americans are concerned with getting their taxes done correctly and on time. As financial information starts to fly between individuals, tax preparers and the IRS, concerns about personal security are rising. In late January, the federal government conducted a nationwide sweep to crack down on identity theft and tax fraud before the 2012 tax season. The timing of the effort was meant to stem the rising tide of fraudulent tax activity, which involves using stolen identities to file for tax refunds. In 2011, the IRS found as many as 260,000 identity theft fraud attempts, up from 49,000 in 2010. While the IRS is taking action to help taxpa...