Bought a train ticket from Great Western? Time to reset your passwords

If you’ve bought a train ticket direct from Great Western Railway using GWR.com then you should reset your password. The company has suffer a massive data breach, which has compromised 1,000 of its user’s passwords. 

Although only one thousand out of the company’s million-plus customer accounts were affected, the company is advising all its customers to change their passwords as a precaution. It has notified the customers that were definitely affected directly, reports The Register.

The breach has provided yet another reminder that it’s a terrible idea to use the same password for different websites. If you use the same password for GWR.com and Amazon.co.uk then you could be much more severely affected by a hack such as this than if you used different passwords for both.

The easiest way to ensure you have a unique, strong password for each website you use is to make sure you use a password manager. These generate unique passwords for each site you use, and then save them so that your not tempted to reuse them to make them easier to remember.

Related: Best password manager

For an added layer of security you should think about setting up ‘Two Factor Authentication’ which usually means you can only login to a site if you have access to your phone. Many services will send a text message to your device, but there are also specific ‘2FA’ apps which will generate these unique codes for you.

Finally, enable 2FA on your password manager for complete peace of mind.

No method is 100% secure, but by following the correct precautions you can turn breaches like this into a minor inconvenience rather than a potentially life-ruining event.

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