The holiday season is about to begin, it is a good opportunity to spend time with your family and love ones.  Depends on where you are, there may be a couple of days in December when no store is open and there isn’t much else to do around town.  Instead of spending all those time watching TV or movies at home, why not to spend an hour to organize your online passwords and social media security settings?  Here are a few tips:

1. Invest in a password management app or service – for every sites that you use online, regardless if it is for banking or for Facebook, you should be using different password for each site. And every month or two you should recreate new passwords.
   • So services such as LastPass, or FOSS app such as KeePass are good tools to use for managing logins. There are other password management tools out there, the open directory has more listed here. However, make sure your master password is extremely complex and you are the only one will ever guess it. Read more here about how to create strong password.
   • If you don’t like having a 3rd party online service to manage your password, KeePass is the choice.  You can install KeePass on a USB key so that you can carry it around.
2. Fully understand privacy settingson websites – get familiar with the security and privacy settings across the sites you use online, here are a few things:
   • Turn on SSL or secure browsing on Facebook, Twitter and other sites.   
   • Validate privacy settings and raise settings to what you are comfortable with, company keep changing their terms of services and privacy settings, keeping settings up-to-date is very important.
   • Turn on 2-step authentication on Google (use your mobile phone as a hard token)
3. Change the PIN on your iPhone or the unlock pattern on your Android phones.
4. Set a habit to use private browsing on Chrome, Firefox or IE (Windows 7 or later), and clear cache and sessions once in a while.  And do the same thing on your smartphones.
5. (Google) review the Dashboard and individual entries under Authorized Access to your Google Account, revoke whatever you don’t need.
6. (Twitter) review the list under Settings -> Applications tab, revoke access of services that you no longer use.
7. If you have a smartphone, spend some time to pick a good security and anti-virus app.  (Lookout Security and AV is pretty decent for Android.)  It is worth every penny!