1. Monitoring service — IdentityForce
2. VPN — ExpressVPN
3. Password Manager — LastPass
4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) — Enabled everywhere I can
Other Things I Use
5. Biometrics
5a. Facial Recognition — use in lieu of MFA where possible. Only on iPhone, not iPad or computer
5b. Fingerprint on Mac. My fingerprints can take a beating and sometimes stop working, so I have to do another scan or wait for the fingerprint to grow back out.
6. Authenticator Apps — I use the app the company supports, mainly Google Authenticator on a financial site and X.
7. Some companies will send an authentication code to their mobile app when you are on their web site on your computer.
8. Change passwords regularly. I change the most important ones more frequently; the unimportant sites I change much less frequently.
9. Complex Passwords. I use computer-generated complex passwords wherever possible. I generate the passwords on the Mac (under System Settings / New Password / Create Strong Password).
10. Passphrase. My master password in LastPass is a five word passphrase with some symbol and number substitutions tossed in (like number zero for letter oh, numeral 7 for letter t, exclamation point for numeral 1). The long passphrase is easy to remember — all you have to learn is where you did the substitutions. Here’s a good passphrase for LastPass to get you started: “D0nat3ToFReeR3publicT0day”
11. Beware of phishing emails. I got one that looked like Wells Fargo Bank the other day, but the English usage was atrocious. Log on to the financial institution to see if there is an alert there.
12. Set up Alerts on all your financial sites. I get alerts to text and email from our credit cards and banks. I get an alert from our credit card companies seconds after making a transaction.
13. Use “Virtual Credit Cards” for all of your online transactions. I use CapitalOne virtual cards. They give you a credit card number, CVV, and expiration date all tied to one merchant (it cannot be used at any other merchants). You can set an expiration date on the card or lock it manually. You can quickly unlock it for re-use. All of the Virtual Credit Cards roll up to your main credit card number. You see all of your transactions on your statement under the main number. You do not get separate statements for each virtual card. I REALLY REALLY LIKE this feature of CapitalOne. ApplePay masks your real credit card number and uses a virtual card in the background.
14. BitDefender antivirus.
It all sounds complex and complicated, but it really isn’t. All these things got added one at a time.
++++++++