On the EasyJet breach, a brief public service thread from me, your neighbourhood friendly technology journalist.


It’s time to enable TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION on everything important, and USE A PASSWORD MANAGER!

I know you've heard about them, and they sound annoying to set up - but they will make your life better. It's time to bite the bullet and sort out your digital security! And if you're sorted - why not check your parents are secure too?

Easyjet is just the latest in countless companies to experience a data breach. They will keep happening, it is a fact of life.

Here's the bad part: If you use the same password for Easyjet or any breached service as, say, your email - that becomes vulnerable too!

Hackers are smart! If they can obtain your password by hacking somewhere easy to hack - like an airline or a pizza delivery company - they know it might be worth trying out on Gmail too. So your whole digital life could be up for grabs.

So what are you going to do? You're going to use TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION. This is where when you login to a service, you are sent a text message with a code to enter before you can login.

It can be enabled on everything important: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Switching it on immediately makes you more secure - to get into your account, it means that a hacker would now need to have your physical phone.

Sure, this doesn't guard against pickpockets, but it does guard against *every other hacker in the world*.

Nerds reading this will know that SMS is not fully secure either and that if you're really paranoid, you can use an authenticator app to make sure you're fully locked down. Do this if you can, but for most people SMS is probably good and easy enough.

Secondly! Password managers! Now Easyjet hasn't said if passwords were compromised - but even email addresses and other details being breached leaves you vulnerable to phishing - hacker can more easily pretend to be Easyjet and/or another service, with realistic emails.

So this is why you're going to make every single password you use, on every service or app, a completely unique string of hard to guess characters.

Sounds annoying, right? But this is why password managers are life-changing.

A password manager app, like 1Password or LastPass, will act like a phone book for your passwords. You have one password you remember for the password manager - and then when you login to another service, the manager will drop in your unique credentials.

The upshot of this is that if one service gets breached - say, an airline, it means you don't have to worry about your same credentials being used to login to anything else. It isolates problems just to what has been hacked.

I've logged in and changed my Easyjet password now, just in case the hackers got the passwords too. No need to worry about changing my password for anything else though, as it was unique to my Easyjet.

Why do I love password managers? Security aside, they make life easier. Setting up a new phone? Download the password manager and I can get logged in to everything with just a FaceID or a click of the mouse. No messing around pressing "lost password" on rarely used things.

Anyway, do *these two simple tricks* as viral content likes to say and you will be a) more secure b) happier c) more attractive.

And if this thread has been telling you what you already know: Call your parents and help them secure their digital lives too.