Recently over seven million members of the independent Minecraft “Lifeboat” community have had their security and privacy put at risk after hackers breached servers and stole usernames, email addresses and MD5-hashed passwords.
Ken Spinner, VP of global field engineering at Varonis offers the following expert opinion for children (and parents)
“Children need to be taught the value of information and the importance of keeping it safe. Personal information that they share in-person or online is like putting a coin in someone else’s piggy bank – be careful what you share, and with whom, because some people and businesses guard their piggy banks better than others. Some basic guidelines that children (and their parents) should follow:
Don’t use the same password in more than one place.
Don’t make passwords easy to guess
Don’t share them with your friends
Changing passwords regularly – monthly.
If you have a choice, share information with businesses and web sites that take security seriously – support for multi-factor authentication is a good start.”
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