080 - Protect Your Online Security & Reputation

Joining us is Patrick Baker, a 30-year IT professional who provides IT technical support and training for older adults, senior care providers, and small businesses.

Patrick started his company Prime of Life Tech in 2019 and serves clients who want to learn more about their technology or who need solutions for their technology problems.

You can learn more about Patrick and his company on LinkedIn and at primeoflifetech.com.

In this episode we cover:

• Online Security
• Password Managers
• Two Factor/Multi Factor Authentication
• Internet Of Things
• Home Network
• Reputation Management
• Employment Eligibility

Thanks so much for tuning in again this week. I appreciate you  🙂

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Special thanks to Patrick Baker for being on the show.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Chapters

• 3:06 Online Security
• 7:00 Password Managers
• 14:50 Two Factor/Multi Factor Authentication
• 18:18 Internet Of Things
• 19:46 Home Network
• 21:17 Reputation Management
• 23:24 Employment Eligibility

Transcript

Marisa Huston  0:00  
Welcome to Episode 80 on the Live Blissed Out podcast. Did you know that as of 2016, approximately 40% of organizations stored their password in a Word document or spreadsheet? Let's hope this statistic has improved. Hello, action taker. Welcome to Live Blissed Out. A podcast where I have inspiration on informational conversations with business owners and subject matter experts to help you get the scoop on a variety of topics. Tired of hesitating or making decisions without having the big picture? Wanna be in the know? Then this is the place to go. I'm your host Marisa Huston. Helping you achieve bliss through awareness and action. So let's get to it. Joining us is Patrick Baker, a 30 year IT professional who provides IT technical support and training for older adults, senior care providers and small businesses. Patrick started his company, Prime of Life Tech in 2019, and serves clients who want to learn more about their technology, or who need solutions for their technology problems. You can learn more about Patrick and his company on LinkedIn, and at www.primeoflifetech.com. The information opinions and recommendations presented in this podcast are for general information only. And any reliance on the information provided in this podcast is done at your own risk. This podcast should not be considered professional advice. Great to have you on the show. Patrick!

Patrick Baker  1:27  
 Thank you so much for Marisa. It's a pleasure to be here.

Marisa Huston  1:29  
We're going to be diving into a conversation about how to utilize technology in our world today. I remember the first day that I got on social media. I believe it was 2008, and I thought what is this? And I never heard of it before. I got an email from a friend going are you on this social media platform? When I got into it for the first time, I was so fascinated by the fact that you could reach out to anybody in the world and send pictures and share information. And of course, it was a novelty at that point. And now, I mean, I hardly know anyone who is not on some sort of social media. And that is just one form of technology. I mean, I'm looking back to even the days working in a corporate job where we were working with DOS, dot matrix printers, you know, everything really old school, green screens. And now it's really amazing how these cell phones are walking computers. And we have access to so many things like apps and anything you want...tools and applications that we would never have even imagined back in the day. Now we have other things to consider. So for example, there's our security. Oftentimes, we're being tracked in so many different ways. There's the issue of passwords, like how do we manage that because we have so many applications and things we have to sign into now that we can't even keep up with that thing. Aside from that, there's also tools that allow us to get help online where we would normally have to do it in person. Now there's more of that technology available for us to talk virtually. I want to discuss how we can keep ourselves safe while utilizing technology to the best of our ability.

Patrick Baker  3:06  
It's interesting, you were talking about how technology has evolved over time. Take your smartphone, for example. You have more computing power in the palm of your hand with your smartphone than they had on the Apollo moon missions. There are many aspects to technology that we take for granted. I remember when social media first came on the scene at the time they were calling it Web 2.0. if you recall. And now it's essentially synonymous with the internet. People don't necessarily think of things beyond social media, sometimes when they're describing the internet. And there's really many facets, many aspects to the internet. The security aspect of things over time has become a very significant issue. I think the main thing there is having to do with identity theft, but also just maintaining the security and integrity of your online accounts. We hear in the news frequently about data breaches. Companies that store information that identifies people in some way, or they house data, like email, personally identifying information such as things like social security numbers, or birth dates, bank accounts, those types of things. That stuff is all very conveniently accessed through the internet, whether through apps or through a web browser. But the cost of that convenience is potential exposure to a data breach. So what power do we have as individuals to protect our data? Our first line of defense is our username and password. Those are like the two key pieces of information that we need to access, essentially every online service that we use, whether it's through an app through a website. There are bad actors out there, hackers, people who essentially want to steal and then sell information about people to other bad actors. That's a thing out there. That's a money making enterprise. They have software that they can use to essentially do a brute force login into your online accounts, essentially using a piece of software to send many 1000s of guesses for passwords within a span of a few seconds. And the problem with that, of course, is that a lot of people either have very simple passwords, the dreaded password 123, or the word password. Sometimes, there are devices that we buy and install in our homes, whether it's a wireless router, or say a cable modem that we're using to access the internet from our house. A lot of times these devices have default passwords, like administrator or password, or something like that. And unfortunately, the bad actors out there, they know this. And so that makes these kinds of things, pretty ripe targets.

Marisa Huston  6:03  
It's like low hanging fruit. They know that there are people that probably aren't aware of it so they prey on those individuals. 

Patrick Baker  6:10  
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't occur to most people that you should change the default password on your wireless router at home. And so it's those kinds of things that can leave us vulnerable. 

Marisa Huston  6:20  
Are there tools that we can use? Because I know still today, there are people that utilize that dreaded little password book where they handwrite every single password, and then that's dangerous, because let's say it gets stolen in some way or lost, then what? And I think that the people that do that, do it for a couple of reasons. One is they don't trust passwords online, because they figure well, those can be hacked, right? And the other thing is they are more tactile. They just like to write things down and have it easily accessible. What alternatives can we consider to make it easier for us to keep our passwords safe and make them still convenient? 

Patrick Baker  7:00  
The main tool that we have at our disposal for that is called a password manager. And there's free and paid versions of those products available as standalone programs or apps that we can use on our mobile devices. They often will share a cloud based database of passwords. So in other words, I can use the same password manager software on my Macbook on my iPad on my smartphone and I'm pointed at the same set of passwords. Some people don't like the idea of keeping their password safe in the cloud, which is what most of these products do. And some offer the ability to store your passwords locally on your device. But in addition to that, there are browser plugins or just the browser's themselves like Google Chrome, for example, has the ability to store your passwords. However, the limitation there is that you can typically only access those passwords when you're using the browser. Now, if I happen to use Google Chrome on all my devices, and I log in with the same login to Chrome on all my devices, then I can access those same passwords, regardless of which device I'm using.

Marisa Huston  8:17  
Is there are a risk if let's say your laptop was stolen? Would somebody else then be able to get access to all those passwords if you use that option?

Patrick Baker  8:26  
I mean, it's certainly a risk, especially if you don't have some sort of login, whether it's through a fingerprint reader or an actual password on your device. So yeah, if my laptop gets stolen, and someone can get into my user account, then yeah, potentially, they could get to all of my passwords through the browser. That's definitely an issue. Password managers, at least the standalone password managers, they typically have what's called a master password. In other words, you have a single password that allows you to get to your database of passwords. And the beauty of that is that you really only have one password that you need to remember. I personally have over 200 passwords to the various online services and other things that I use. And so having to even attempt to try to remember that many passwords would be impossible for me, even if I were 20 years younger.

Marisa Huston  9:24  
It would be impossible for most of us!

Patrick Baker  9:26  
Right? Having a single password to remember to get all my passwords. That's a good thing. 

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Marisa Huston  10:36  
Can those password managers be breached as well? Or are those probably encrypted several times over? I don't know how that works. But are they pretty safe to use? 

Patrick Baker  10:46  
I believe that the password databases themselves are an encrypted file on your device, even if it's something that's shared out on the cloud. So you would definitely need to have the master password or the ability to you know, somehow break that encryption. Most people don't have the tools to do that. But even aside from the password managers themselves, there's bad habits that people pick up over time with regard to passwords. Things like not using a complex password. A complex password is essentially a password that is 10 to 20 characters long. It consists of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and then the symbols that you get when you press the Shift key and you type a number on the keyboard. So like the ampersand, or the dollar sign, for example. Also, something to consider is using what's known as a password phrase. So a password phrase could be like a short phrase or a sentence, such as, I like to walk the dog, where you substitute things like numbers for certain letters, or you plug in some of those special characters in between things. Maybe you use an underscore to separate a couple of the words in there or something like that. But a phrase that's easy to remember for you that's not necessarily something that your average hacker is going to think of. 

Marisa Huston  12:13  
It reminds me of the movie, The Imitation Game, when they talked about Enigma, and how there were millions of codes that they had to decipher, and without the computer, they wouldn't have been able to break into it. What you're saying is that if people add characters or make any changes, it just makes the password a lot more complicated so it's more difficult to break.

Patrick Baker  12:34  
Exactly our password managers foolproof? The short answer is no. They're encrypted files. And so the likelihood of being able to unpack an encrypted file is still pretty low, I think. But it's definitely not something that we should take lightly. The onus is on these companies that store our information to keep it securely, and to make sure that their networks and that their infrastructure is secure. 

Marisa Huston  13:00  
I would imagine one of the benefits, though, is that when that happens, it's easy to change everything immediately. So you can go in and make updates as soon as possible so that everything then gets changed at once. Whereas when you go the old school way, which is writing it down in a book and trying to change 200 different passwords, that would be a little more complicated. So, I would imagine that that's one of the benefits, though is that when that happens, you can easily change it. 

Patrick Baker  13:27  
Yeah, you can easily change it. And generally speaking, I think people should try to use complex passwords, don't repeat the use of your passwords. In other words, don't reuse the same password for multiple online services or apps or anything. And then thirdly, to use a password manager. Again, if you just have the one master password that you have to remember, and then the others you can just access through your device it's a much better setup for you and more secure option for doing your business online. 

Marisa Huston  13:59  
Now, you mentioned Patrick, that some of these tools that are available, some of them are free, and some of them have a cost. Is there a big difference between free versus a paid service when it comes to passwords?

Patrick Baker  14:11  
I think that what you're getting, when you go for the premium or the paid version of these products, is you get access to additional features. Some of those might include things like the ability to have a family plan. In other words, with a certain product, you have the ability for everyone in your family to have not only their own password database that's kind of under one umbrella license as it were. But you also have the ability to create a shared password database that you can share out with other members of your family. 

Marisa Huston  14:41  
So it's essentially features. You just want to look at what is being offered when you purchase a paid plan versus decide to choose a free plan. 

Patrick Baker  14:50  
Correct. And then one other thing I want to add is there's a certain school of thought that says that passwords just aren't enough. That passwords are too easy to break. It's not enough of a barrier to entry to some of these secure platforms and services and oftentimes some of these services they have what is known as two factor or multi factor authentication. So in addition to your username and password there's this numeric code that is oftentimes sent to you over text or SMS that you can use to access your online accounts. Also within the IT community the thinking that the text base or SMS based two factor authentication is also not as secure as it needs to be. Text messages could be technically intercepted. So if you had someone paying close enough attention to what you were doing they could theoretically intercept your code being sent over the airwaves to your phone and gain entry to your accounts. The solution for that is what's known as app based multi factor or 2FA. You would download a product. Google has one Microsoft has one. It's an app that you set up and usually you begin the process by scanning a QR code on the service that you're using. So for example if i was on Facebook and i was using one of these authenticator apps, Facebook would present me with a QR code that i would scan and that essentially lets the authenticator app know that hey this is a login from this particular service, generate this code for that service. And then that essentially creates the handshake as it were between the authenticator app and whatever service it is that you're using to generate this code for. 

Marisa Huston  16:40  
That's just another tool that you can use as well. See i didn't even know about that. That's great! 

Patrick Baker  16:44  
Yeah. And you know not all online services support multi factor authentication. I think more of them need to start going that direction just to add that extra layer of security. So i use it when i have the option. Like i can't even transfer money on my bank account between different accounts above a certain dollar amount without having one of these codes. There's certain things where that kind of additional authentication is getting baked in which i think is a good move. Especially for things like bank accounts brokerage accounts. Even when you think about it with something like Facebook, especially if you have a business that you're trying to promote through Facebook. You're using those platforms, meaning social media, to essentially build your brand, to establish your reputation. And so keeping those accounts secure it's almost like reputation management.

Marisa Huston  17:41  
Given the fact that all of the technology that we're using now, they seem to all communicate with each other. So for example. Let's say that you were using a device on your television, you can access it through your phone. And it almost feels like if my phone got missing what would i do? Because a lot of times these things rely on sending me information to my phone in order for me to access whatever accounts I have. What are your thoughts on the internet of things? Like everything coming together. Do you think that that's safe per se, or are there things we should be thinking about in terms of how we connect our devices together?

Patrick Baker  18:18  
There are stories out there and you may have heard these people hacking into things like baby monitors that are internet aware. Things like doorbell cameras and that sort of thing. Yeah there's definitely a security aspect to the internet of things or IOT devices. I mean think about it this way, when you connect a device to your home network whether you intend to or not you are creating an entry point into your home network. Now, these devices need to have a secure layer built into them whether it's you know through some sort of password protection, whether it's through encryption. There are aspects to these devices that you need to be conscious of the fact that you are creating a doorway into your home network. One of the things that most people may not be aware of is that on your home network the hardware you're using for your home network especially if it's something that's been around say within the last five years or so, you have the ability actually to create more than one network in your home using these devices. An example being you could create a separate guest network. Oftentimes you may have heard of people having like a guest network on their home network.

Marisa Huston  19:39  
Even when you sign on to let's say Youtube. You can sign on as yourself or you can have a guest sign on in a separate platform basically.

Patrick Baker  19:46  
Exactly. So you could have all of your IOT devices connected to your guest network so that it's not connected to the network where for example your pc with all of your proprietary business information, all of your personal financial information and that sort of thing are not on the same network as these devices. So that's one approach that people take. The advantage to doing that is the fact that you have these devices connected to a separate network from your main home network or office network. The disadvantage of doing that is that to control those devices from a device like a tablet or a smartphone, those devices will also have to be attached to that guest network in order to interact with those IOT devices. That's a minor inconvenience I think, to be able to access the devices through your smartphone or tablet but it's a fact that it is a separate network so if you wanted to be able to get to things on your main network you would have to switch networks on your phone or your tablet to be able to do that. 

Marisa Huston  20:54  
Patrick, relating to social media...you know we're all so dependent on it now and it seems like every time you turn around there's a new platform out there that's being offered and everybody's on it. We spend hours on it per day, unfortunately. And that's really the new normal for everybody. So what are some things we should be thinking about in terms of keeping ourselves safe when we use social media? 

Patrick Baker  21:17  
I think we need to think about the scope of who we're sharing the things we share on social media with. Does every single tweet, does every single Facebook post, is every single Instagram post that i put out there, does it have to be shared with the whole world? Or am i really trying to hit a subset of that very large audience? Am i really trying to communicate things with just my friends and my family, or do i really want to put myself out there for the whole world? Something that i've been given a lot of thought to lately is what's known as your digital footprint. Your digital footprint is essentially the record of everything that you do online, whether it's actively or passively. Passive would be like when I go to a website and the website sticks a cookie on my computer. Whether it's a tracking cookie or it's just a cookie that says that i'm currently logged in or I'm not. That's information that's about me that may be out there. They may manifest itself in some way down the road. Whether it's a Google search that turns up a post that said some really obnoxious things that i said 5, 10 years ago or it could just be the fact that maybe I still have an account with Myspace, Social Media 1.0. I think it's really a matter of having awareness of what we put out there and how we come across. Especially if you're in business and you're using your social media business accounts to express personal opinions. I think it's inadvisable to mix your personal opinions with your business presence online. It's all part of that whole reputation management.

Marisa Huston  22:53  
And i guess it depends. Like some people like to rock the boat and they feel like that's actually going to attract the type of people that they want by standing behind something that may not even have anything to do with their business. But people want to be with them because they agree with them. And then it will basically take away the people that they don't want to work with. That's one way to approach it. But at the end of the day, if you want to not alienate anybody specific keep it as neutral as possible and keep your business and your personal opinions separate.

Patrick Baker  23:24  
Right exactly. Another thing to consider is, even if you're not in business but you're pretty active on social media there are entities out there like employers, like colleges and universities who often turn to social media to try and get a better understanding of the people that they're potentially either accepting into the student body or who they're maybe hiring for a position at the company. And if you have a lot of publicly accessible social media posts that are somewhat incendiary in nature, you know again it's that whole reputation management thing. Is that something that you want your potential employer to see? Is it something that you want the school that you're applying to...Is that something that you want those people to see, the admissions people? Those are the kinds of things that i don't think we necessarily think about when we're tapping out that impassioned tweet and then hit the send icon. I'm not sure that all that is being considered when we post to social media.

Marisa Huston  24:23  
Just be very cognizant of what you're putting out there is what you're saying right?

Patrick Baker  24:27  
Exactly.

Marisa Huston  24:28  
Patrick, how can people learn more about what you do, who you serve, what you offer? 

Patrick Baker  24:34  
I work with the older adult population . I work with senior care professionals and small businesses . And you can learn about my services at www.primeoflifetech.com . Or you can search for Prime Of Life Tech on Facebook or on LinkedIn. I originally started this business with the intention of serving the older adult community. As I started to interface with people in the business community more through networking events, social media and so forth i realized that really anyone could benefit from my services whether they're in business whether they're just private individuals who are struggling with their technology and need some assistance. I essentially either will teach you something more about your technology or i can help solve problems with your technology. My clients range in age from 27 to 97, so anywhere in between I'm happy to help. I've done some speaking gigs for a couple of local organizations here in the Denver area. They're really more senior focused in nature and then my own personal online series Senior Tech Coffee. I serve that up a couple times a month. I'm generally either talking about subjects that are at the intersection of technology and older adults or just more broadly technology topics generally speaking. They can learn more about my online offerings from my website. And then Senior Tech Coffee can also be accessed through Meetup. com. You can just go to www.meetup.com and search for Senior Tech Coffee. 

Marisa Huston  25:13  
Technology is a wonderful thing. We all use it, we all need it. We rely on it. But at the same time there's so much we have to be thinking about to keep ourselves safe and utilize them to the best of our ability. So i really appreciate you sharing all of these valuable tips with us today. Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Baker  26:26  
Marisa, I really appreciate you taking the time to have me on the show today and the honor to be on your program.

Marisa Huston  26:32  
How are you managing your passwords and online reputation? Send us a tweet at www.twitter.com/lbopodcast. Thanks for listening and thanks to Patrick Baker for joining us on the show. If you have a question or comment for a future episode, all you have to do is go to www.speakpipe.com/lbovm or click the link in the show notes to leave a brief audio message. If you find value in our show, please visit www.liveblissed out.com to reach out subscribe and share on social media. This show is made possible through listeners like you. Thank you. So long for now and remember to keep moving forward!