What Nobody Is Telling You About the Anthem Inc. Breach

The Anthem Inc. breach is massive and making headlines this week. The company disclosed on Wednesday that personally identifiable information (PII) of 80 million current and former members and employees have been lifted from their servers, including:

• Names
• Dates of birth
• IDs and social security numbers
• Addresses
• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• Employment info

Yikes.

There’s a good chance you’re not surprised or moved by this kind of news anymore. It’s called breach fatigue. You hear about big breaches so often that you start to become less responsive to them. You don’t know why it matters or what you’re supposed to do when all your info feels exposed all the time anyway.

Here’s why it matters.

Your personal information can be used to commit identity fraud or theft – those scary words that make the hairs on your arms stand up. Having your personal information makes it easy to impersonate you,  say, online, where someone can get into your accounts where other valuables are.

Here’s what you can do to protect yourself now and before the next big breach.

You’re not as powerless over your privacy as you think – it is your information, after all.

Stop making your passwords personal.

As it happens, people use personal information when they create their passwords. (How else are you supposed to remember them?!) You combine your wife’s birth date with your daughter’s middle name and your latest street name. It meets the requirements, and you can remember it.

This is officially a terrible, horrible password system.

Start making your passwords random.

If your passwords don’t resemble this “9q34t98u$FQA8a$WQA”, then your PII gives hackers the pieces to the puzzle that is your identity, you’re your digital life, your accounts. And not just to one account, but all of them.

But who could ever remember “9q34t98u$FQA8a$WQA”? And who wants to write that down or type it? Guh.

Manage your passwords already.

You’ve heard the expression, “fight fire with fire”, right?

Dashlane is your fire. It securely keeps track of your passwords, so only you can access them. And the keys to your castle are never stored anywhere.

Dashlane is unlike your other accounts. First, it’s an app, not an online account. Online accounts allow you to access information online, and they transmit your password from your computer to their server.

Dashlane allows you to access your information from your device, on your device (with your access code verified in real-time). Your key to Dashlane is never and never needs to be sent or stored anywhere online. This makes the info on our servers totally useless. (Because encryption.) There’s no key to it except the key that you have in your head.

See, we have access to our servers day and night – without having to hack into them – and even WE can’t figure out your passwords.  It is more than just the strength of our defense; it is the structure of our system. Hacking is irrelevant.

What’s not irrelevant is how you can put Dashlane to work for you. You can use it to create random, bizarre passwords that are totally meaningless except for the sake of entering and protecting your accounts – the way a password should be.

And you can have those crazy passwords everywhere…

You can remember them.

You don’t even have to type them.

… and then you’ll be living in a world where all your accounts aren’t daisy-chained together by a password or a password system that’s broken. Our users call it life in the Dashlane.

Ready to take back control?