LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- EBay is the latest in a growing list of companies whose data have been hacked. Last year one in seven Americans was notified that their personal data had been breached, according to a Consumer Reports survey. That's a 56-percent increase over the year before.
Consumer Reports tested out ways to help you keep your private information private.
Cyber-thieves are always looking for new ways to steal your personal data. One of the best ways to protect yourself online is using strong passwords. But who can remember all those passwords?
One solution: password managers. Consumer Reports Senior Product Analyst Dean Gallea tested one called LastPass that keeps all your passwords in one place. He and says it's a good option.
"LastPass saves your login ID and password for websites you've told it to. And the next time you go to that website, it fills it in for you," said Gallea.
But isn't LastPass also vulnerable to hackers?
"LastPass stores your personal information in its secure online vault, and any communications between that vault and your computer are encrypted so that it makes it effectively unreadable, even to a hacker," said Gallea.
You can download the service for free for use on your computer, or if you want the $12 annual premium service, you'll get access to LastPass on all your mobile devices.
But some people are too afraid to put their passwords in the hands of someone else. Another option is to create easy-to-remember, hard-to-crack passwords yourself.
"A more secure password has at least nine characters and has a combination of letters, numbers and symbols," said Gallea. "You can use a core password that's easy to remember and then put characters ahead of it and after it to vary it for different websites."
Even after all the recent news on cyber-security, the easy-to-guess password "1-2-3-4-5-6" is still the number-one choice, according to the password management company SplashData.
Consumer Reports says you should also avoid ordinary dictionary words, which hackers can easily crack using software that tries out just about every word there is.