I messed up!

I did it again!

But out of that comes a really good formula for keeping safe . . .

I've been thinking of this one for a while, it hit me on a bike ride the other day.

Not a car or anything!

Rather a way of keeping the things I treasure most safe and sound away from horrible people who want to make me cry by stealing my sh*t.

First let me tell you about something that you should know about, which you probably don't if you are a new member of Steemit, and maybe if you're not so new!

Beware Of Memo Fraud

Unfortunately there are people out there whom instead of working and busting their ass to make it out of whatever crappy situation they're in, prefer to use their energies to find out ways to steal from others.

These people have varying degrees of success using these tactics, sometimes they get caught, sometimes they don't. I'd love to believe in Karma (in fact I used to), however good things do happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good ones. I've seen it too often, and it makes me sad and angry.

I've seen it here on Steemit, and how these bad people steal people's accounts has been in a number of ways. One of the most sneaky ways your account can be compromised is through memo fraud.

Memo fraud is whereby somebody running a script that they have either coded themselves or bought from an equally nasty person; usually referred to as a hacker, uses that code to scan for things that have been copy and pasted into the memo section on your wallet.

Of course we all make mistakes, and some clever little oik, worked out that often the mistake we make is pasting our master password or active key into the memo space.

They can then scan and copy that password and voilà! They steal your password, your account, and ultimately all your funds :-(.

Cry Me A River

Make no mistake, once this has been done there is no way to get your account back, because of course the person doing so will change your password immediately, and your account will become their account.

There will be nothing left to do but to cry, and to ask others to cry with you . . . I've seen it happen and it is not great.

The Ultimate Protection

The best way to protect against this of course is to not paste your active, owner, or master password into this space. However mistakes are made, as I myself did this morning.

As you know if you have ever transferred money out of Steemit, your account requires you to use your active/owner key to complete the transaction, so it is only natural that as you do this you will copy the key from wherever you keep it.

Thus it is easy to make a mistake and paste into memo if you're not paying attention to what you're doing.

Nowadays as you paste your password in the Steem engine does warn you not to do this; however my (scant) understanding of this, is that once you have done it, the thieves can detect it pretty much immediately.

So the ONLY PROTECTION is to change your password IMMEDIATELY. Not tomorrow, not later, not in five minutes after you make that cup of tea NOW!!

Damn it, that needs one more exclamation mark . . .

NOW!!!

Got it?

Good.

The Status Quo

OK, onto my really great formula for keeping your Steemit account secure.

Do it anyway!

Yup, it's as simple as that, change your frigging password once every four weeks or so. Man if you're super paranoid change it everyday.

If you're a coder, code a piece of software to change it every hour!

Haha, maybe that's going a bit too far, but the point is that if you get into the habit of changing your password once a month, the chances that someone will get hold of it diminishes. (###### note: this is probably a great idea for a piece of software, however I don't think I would trust something like that unless I coded it!)

Beware Of The Phishers

Of course changing your password regularly will not help you if you blithely paste it in anytime any Tom, Dick, or Harry asks you to.

I trust Steemit with my password, and Steemconnect (just), and Steemconnect only ever with my posting key, which if somebody steals, they'll be able to post for me, until I notice and change it.

So with all that being said . . .

Stay safe people!

DO YOU HAVE GOOD PASSWORD HABITS? OR MAYBE YOU HAVE AN AMAZING ONLINE SECURITY SAFE PRACTICES FORMULA THAT YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE WITH THE REST OF US?

DID I USE ENOUGH EXCLAMATION MARKS (!!!) IN THIS POST? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Title image: Mike Kononov on Unsplash

Cryptogee