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I work in an industry where cyber threats are an extreme risk to national security (to an extent). With that being said, I have learned a great deal about being more secure online over the years. I think you should be concerned as well.

Did you know that this site currently encounters 80-100 hack attempts per day? Sometimes a distinctly greater amount. I have a GREAT deal of provisions set forth to protect this site and its users.

The single best piece of advice I can give all of you in everyday life is to use very secure passwords for all of your online activity whether its here or your bank account. It is common knowledge to know that a very large percentage of the population uses a simple insecure password they can "remember" and they use it for everything they do online. This is an outright disaster waiting to happen. An example of passwords:

Insecure password: fishingiscool
Secure password: Hy,O.9auvln|:@YhU#eH

Looks crazy eh? It should be the norm. Robots are all over the internet sitting there trying to guess your passwords. This site bans people/robots after a few unsuccessful tries for a period of time. This deters script kiddies and password robots, and exponentially increases the time for them to accomplish their task.

A secure password takes a great deal of computing power and a great deal of time to guess - years at best when running nonstop. An insecure password could take days or even hours to guess with no website protections in place.

Many of you probably shutter at the thought of some ridiculous secure password like I have posted above. You can use a password program to do all of this for you. There are a few good ones out there, but I use a piece of software called KeePass. It is free and works amazingly well. You do not even have to type in the password yourself (Read the manual). It allows you to auto login to a website with a simple keyboard shortcut. It has a password generator which is fantastic as well - so you don't have to create your own. There is other software that works on PC/MAC/Smartphones and syncs - however I do believe you have to pay for that. An example of such software is called ewallet.

If you elect not to use a password manager - make your passwords more secure by using a capital letter or two, and perhaps some special characters. Password robots always target the low hanging fruit first, which is generally a password that is all lower case. Replace a "1" with "!" or replace "a" with "@" etc etc. as well as using some Caps. An example: F!shing!sC00l.

Also - be very aware of Phishing attempts. Never clink a link in an email asking you to log on to a website and verify some "information". Legitimate websites will NEVER ask you to do this. Often times this is a fake site, with an address that looks legitimate. When you try to log in, the hackers steal your passwords.

Simple things like this will go a long way in protecting yourself. Food for thought.

Some good points Jeff thank you. When the site says 500 guests online, im thinking those are the robots or whatever?

Yes a good number of them are bots. Some legitimate such as google, yahoo, bing etc etc. A good portion are also viewers that have no account. From my statistics, they outweigh registered users by about 10 to 1. Have to work on finding a way to get more folks registered.

Good info Dirty. One of the new ones also is ransomware (which recently was on the news). They trick you into clicking on a file or link and bam - all your files are encrypted and you better have a backup or you have to pay the ransom to unlock your file. Also talking security more and more social hacking is more common - they found it was easier to trick people into giving out their information either through emails or false websites like you mentioned or just calling people and pretending to be someone they are not.

Another interesting way to get personal information is just looking at the back of a persons car. Gives them the kids names (nancy with the softball team, or Johnny with the baseball team), how many kids and if you have dogs, what school the kids go to (my child is an honor roll student at...) etc etc (those stickers tell a lot).

When you piece together all the little bits of information you can learn a lot about people they can then use it call you and try to trick you into giving information (Hi this is so and so from the school - Johnny was in an accident and we need...) or use that information to figure out your password (NancyJohnny1990).

Good point - social hacking is becoming much more common!

A common one is having an unlocked wifi in a public place. They leave it unlocked on purpose. You connect to it with your phone and BAM >> they are in you phone and what ever else is on your phone. Don't set your phone to auto connect. Set up encryption on your phone and always be skeptical.

I should say device instead of phone as they all can link such as your tablet, watch, and even some locators can interconnect wirelessly to multiple devices and hackers will find the easiest point of entry and try to exploit it.