The average American today has more than 150 online accounts. The number keeps growing as we continue to open accounts almost every day.
The second step to securing ourselves in the cyber world is to know what assets we have out there. It gives us a good idea of what risks we have and how to minimize those risks. A simple step is to prepare a list of all our online accounts and make a plan to secure each one of these.
We have prepared a template we have used to organize our online accounts. We are making it available on our website and you can download it for free and get a head start in preparing this list. Use this template as a starting point to get a complete listing of all your personal data which is online. You can then follow the action plan to secure the data and minimize the exposure.
You might also be using Password managers like 1Password, LastPass etc., but it is still beneficial to have this list to be able to manage all the accounts. (What is a Password Manager?)
Explaining this template
The following sections contain brief description to help you collect the data and fill it out. You can then use it to filter the information and take the next steps to protect the data.
Categories and Risks
The online accounts that the average American has can be grouped into many different categories. You can call it by a different name or might want to group them in a different way but they would broadly fall into these categories.
The average American had 150 online accounts in 2017 and is expected to grow to 300 in 2022.
Dashlane 2017 study
It might be useful to categorize these by risk based on the damage it can cause in the event of hackers gaining access to these. Accounts related to our finances, credit cards, retirements are the most risky and need to be monitored and protected with greater care compared to a subscription to a newspaper account. The risk increases depending on what information is stored in these accounts. Many e-commerce accounts might have our name and address but some might save our credit card. The risk increases for these accounts in that case. We can adopt a 1-5 scale with 5 being the most risky.
Description of the other columns
The table below provides a brief description of the other columns.
Password update schedule
Here is a suggestion for how often one should updates their account passwords.
We hope this template will help you understand how exposed you are to cyber criminals, get organized in securing yourself and get you started on your personal security plan. Act now and strengthen the community of secure cyber citizens!
