INCREASE SECURITY AND EASE OF ACCESS

There's been a rash of reports recently about identity theft and/or theft of real or virtual goods (that are worth real money) from peoples' accounts. The story that caught my attention this week was about the hacking of thousands of World of Warcraft accounts by keylogging software that had been surreptitiously downloaded onto players' Windows computers when they visited game-related sites. This is big news! Thousands of players have been affected. Many of them have had virtual assets stolen from their WOW accounts.

There's a nifty free software utility that I recommend to deal with password chaos and identity theft, which also streamlines your actions on the sites you frequent the most. It's an "Invisible Password Manager" from Actioneer.

You can easily store your passwords securely and keep them encrypted on both your computer and on a portable thumb drive so you have them with you on the go. But even better, Actioneer both logs you onto the sites you frequent the most, and performs the actions you do most often--search and retrieve information, check flight status, post information to files, and so on.

Among the dozens of connectors tthat are available out of the box is the logon for members of this research service. (I have an in, and also a bias, since the CEO is my husband, Tom Hagan. But I am sincerely a fan and an addicted user of the Actioneer utility. If you're curious, you can see him in action in the demo videos on the site). Once you've downloaded ! the software, enter your username and password into the Vault, and from then on, just click open your Actioneer note (Ctrl+Alt,+N), type PSG and the word or phrase you're seeking, and voila!

Once you start using Actioneer, you'll find it addictive. You'll use it to perform quick actions on both password-protected sites (your bank, brokerage, Amazon, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, et al.) and on non-password-protected sites, such as getting quick definitions from Wikipedia or Ask.com or Google, checking package status at UPS or FedEx, etc. This week, they're adding connectors for World of Warcraft and other popular gaming sites. If there's a connector you want, you can request it using the Feedback form on the connectors page (http://actioneer.com/connectors.html). Soon, they'll have a toolkit available, so we can make and share our own connectors with each other.

As with many free early products, this one still has some rough edges. For example, Actioneer doesn't support Mozilla Firefox yet, so you have to have Internet Explorer set as your default browser, even if you normally use Firefox, as I ! do. But I haven't found that to be an impediment. I still browse with Firefox and do my quick actions through Actioneer. It's a time saver and gives me peace of mind.

Comments

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Identity theft is done very easilyy if people don't secure wireless networks or if they use the WEP security feature from the router instead of WAP/WAP-2 . WEP is easly broken and if you don't even have password protection, it is like leaving your wallet on the front door floor.