As has been widely reported, Adobe’s servers were hacked and huge amount of data was stolen – some 9.3 gigabytes – including email addresses and passwords. One of mine was was caught in the net. You can check to see if your email address was in the group by going to http://adobe.cynic.al/ and entering your email address in the “Search Box” in the upper left of the page. If the response is that your’s was compromised – it will be easy to tell as it will come up in red vs. green if the address is not found – log into Adobe and change your password. You can find a more complete discussion on this issue at http://bit.ly/HHh3BW

But that’s only a part of the problem. Many of us use the same password on more than one site – shouldn’t but do. That being the case you will also want to find all of those occurrences and change the password on that site. Given that this will not be the last time someone with less than honorable intentions hacks one of the sites we use it might be time to look at a secure password manager. Rather than bore you with my less than perfect knowledge on the subject, the PCMag website has a very recent review of password mangers – November 5, 2013 -at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2426798,00.asp.

This may be the biggest hack of all time but regardless of the size of the hack if your information is compromised you have problems. So even if you do not look at a password manager at least do not use the same password on multiple sites.