Protecting Your Digital Identity

How many sites do you log into everyday? Between work email, personal email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the other accounts the average person has online, the number is probably fairly large. With that in mind, how many passwords do you have? That number is almost certainly smaller. Therein lies the core of the issue with digital identity protection.

Online, users must prove their identities using credentials, such as a password. This process is called authentication, and it is essential to protecting your “digital identity.” If authentication can be circumvented, then anyone can pretend to be anyone else online, and that can lead to serious problems. For example, most of the major data breaches over the course of the last year were accomplished by hackers who had gained access to credentials that they shouldn’t have had. Armed with this information, they were able to access systems and steal data on a truly massive scale.