Twitch, a live streaming video platform has been hacked putting users in danger of identity theft.  Twitch,  which has been around since 2011 and was bought by Amazon in 2014 capitalizes in the exploding interest in video games and broadcasts video game competitions and other video game related content.  It is hugely popular.  Unfortunately, anything popular will be a target for hackers and identity thieves so it came as no surprise that Twitch accounts appear to have been hacked.  Twitch is retiring users passwords and stream keys as well as disconnecting accounts from Twitter and YouTube.

TIPS

Perhaps the biggest threat is to Twitch users who, as many people do, use the same password for all of their online accounts.  Hackers often take advantage of this fact by hacking into websites with weaker security, stealing personal information and passwords and use that information to access accounts that can be exploited for greater financial gain.  The lesson, of course is to use unique and complex passwords for each of your online accounts.  This is not as difficult as it may sound because a good way to choose a password is to pick a phrase such as IDon’tlikepasswords, which combines both capital letters, small letters and a symbol, which in turn makes it a complex password.  Then add a couple of symbols to this base password so it reads, for example, IDon’tLikePasswords!!! and then uniquely adapt this password with a few letters that describe the specific account so, for example your Amazon account password would be IDon’tLikePasswords!!!Ama.  That is a strong password and a way to make unique, but easy to remember passwords for all of your accounts.