For the second time in the past few weeks millions of Americans personal information has been compromised by hackers. Now the hack attack on PlayStation Network has affected over 70 million people worldwide and has caused the service to be shut down for more than a week now. If you don't play online games or download movies to your PS3 then you have nothing to worry about, but for those of us that do what to do next?
You will need to change all of your account information as soon as the PSN network comes back online, but before that follow my guide on how to "Life Lock" your credit. Next I recommend using Yahoo Mail Plus to thwart off future events. It's around $20 dollars per year, but for that you get disposable email address along with a few other nice features. You simply create a prefix-suffix for your address (ex:maddencorner-blogs@yahoo.com, maddencorner-accounts@yahoo.com, maddencorner-test@yahoo.com).
The prefix will remain the same, but you can make up to 500 separate suffixes. These messages are still delivered to your in-box, and it keeps you from handing out your primary address. If the address ever becomes compromised create a new suffix for the effected account and delete the old address. I know there are plenty of tips and tricks out there, but I've tried most of them and I find this one the most effective.
The next great feature from the Yahoo's Mail Plus service is the ability to receive your email messages through POP access or mail forwarding. That way if you use another email program or client you can forward all of your Yahoo messages to your primary email address and create a filter/sub-folder for the Yahoo messages so they don't clutter up your inbox.
Have you been caught by the recent data breaches? I have, but I'm not worried. We live in a digital world and sometimes these things will happen, but don't let it deter you from getting on-line.
