8. The answer you seek is yourself. As time goes by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo possess more and more data for the information seekers. This includes personal data about you. A good way to see if you are a victim or how great your overall risk is to Google yourself. You will be unpleasantly surprised to find what is actually out on the web about you. With the unfortunate invention of things like public information it has become relatively easy for companies to harvest personal information and sell it to the highest bidder, which then sells to the highest bidder, and so on. Sites like Pipl.Com require a membership to get access, but don't really appear to validate who you really are.

9. Use multiple email accounts. One final thing you can do to protect yourself is use different email accounts for different things. It is not uncommon for people these days to have multiple phone numbers. They have one for work, one for home, another for their cell. You forward calls to each number for different reasons. Why wouldn't you do the same for your email? Have one email address for work, one for personal important business like banking, and one for everything else? This will limit what data the hackers will get in the event of a breach. Remember companies make money off selling email and personal marketing data. This way if your junk email gets out of control you can get a new one and start over without a big issue.

10. Tell a white lie. A final note that doesn't really have anything to do so much with accounts but does help you in the long run is, when a site asks for data like your birthday or address, pick a fake location that you can easily remember and use that address. Pick a fake birthday as well and only use a first initial or a fake first name. This way in the event your data is sold or even stolen, who cares? They only got bogus info. This only works for mailing lists and other spam like sites. You would not want to do this to a site like IRS.gov that deals with your taxes.

Following these 10 tips won't guarantee you'll never have a problem because there is no such thing as absolute security, but you will maximize your personal security and minimize your overall risk footprint. The key is to make it infinitely difficult for hackers to get the data and, if they do, it will be of no real benefit and the hackers will move on to a more palatable target.

Firewall Experts, based in the greater Boston area, provides security services and solutions around regulatory compliance. This includes security infrastructure design and implementation as well as penetration testing, security training and documentation services. For more information visit www.firewallexperts.com.