Over the past few months, we have seen an increase in Schwab alerts regarding suspicious activity in clients' accounts. Thankfully, no one has been breached because Schwab is on watch. This is becoming a very serious issue we are hoping all our clients pay special attention to!
We are thankful to have Schwab as a partner as they are a gatekeeper for your accounts and are continually monitoring them for suspicious activity. If they recognize some, they immediately restrict that client's accounts and notify both us and the client immediately. Only when the client contacts Schwab's Fraud department, will release the restriction. Their Fraud department has been wonderful in these situations; offering help to detect, monitor and prevent future hackers.
Of the handful of clients that Schwab helped protect from an attack this year, almost all of them were due to a stolen password - mostly on email accounts and a Twitter account. Reusing passwords on multiple websites makes it all the easier for hackers to get you. Once they get one of your passwords, then they try it on your investment and other accounts. Thankfully, Schwab has an excellent prevention process.
We are reminding our clients that they should not just rely on Schwab's monitoring systems but should absolutely be using a different set of passwords for every account they have AND changing them every 90 days (if not more often).
"How can I possibly keep up with this?" you might ask. We have a solution... it's called LastPass (and there are many other versions of this if you'd like to try something else). You create a very difficult password for LastPass and then download the application to your web browser. Every time you visit a page that you need a password, change it to a LastPass generated password and it will store it in your vault for you. All you will need to remember is YOUR LastPass password and then change it very frequently. We use it at Caissa and I use it personally - it works GREAT!
Here is a link to start with LastPass for
click here. If you would like to extend LastPass to your mobile devices it only costs about $12 a year! It's so inexpensive you can't pass it up. We have cheat sheets ready for you at your next Caissa meeting and will help you get things set up -
we truly believe this will help thwart hackers from attacking your accounts.
Please check out the
article below for more about Cyber Security including some helpful do's and don'ts. As always, we are here to answer any questions you might have.