Is there such a thing as a secure password? It seems like every month or so there is a similar announcement. Last month Yahoo! was hacked, with hackers exposing something like 450,000 user passwords. The month before that, it was LinkedIn where 6 million user passwords were exposed. And these are just the latest episodes. You (the user) has no control over the security (or lack of it) by an online service such as Yahoo!

Would you know if your site had been hacked? Could you restore it if it had been hacked? These three steps will help you prepare for the worst. If you follow technology news, it seems that high-visibility websites are being compromised (hacked) with astonishing frequency. Even to the point where at least one hacker group is using the threat of its hacking as a political weapon. You might think that big sites, like major corporate sites or government sites, are so well protected that they can’t be hacked.

We tweeted the TechCruch story about the site which, if you visited while logged in to a Google account, sent you an email proving it had just harvested your email information. Scary, isn’t it? Well, the screenshotof the website, itself (no, we didn’t visit it to see if it was true – besides, it was down by the time we got there . . . ) got us thinking about security and how this occurred.

When you think about it, attempting to provide security in a medium (social media) where the objective is to share (at least to some degree) personal aspects of your life, doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that Mark Zukerberg of Facebook famously declared that privacy is dead. But is it? Should it be that way? Even with Facebook moving the goal posts every few weeks, and changing the way you control access to your data, and sometimes defaulting to very poor choices, you still have some opportunities to control what you share outside your circle of friends (real friends, I mean, not just Facebook “friends”).