Think about every website you've ever made an account on. Your bank. Your email. Netflix. Amazon. Your doctor's patient portal. That streaming service you signed up for once and forgot about. Most people have somewhere between 50 and 100 online accounts. And most people are protecting all of them with just a handful of passwords.

That's a problem — but it's also a fixable one.

Why so many accounts?

Every time you check out at a new online store, sign up for a newsletter that requires an account, or create a login for a school, workplace, or utility company, you've added another account to your list. Most of us don't track these. We just create the account and move on.

The result is dozens of accounts scattered across the internet, many of which you haven't thought about in years. And some of those old accounts are still sitting there, holding your email address, your name, sometimes your payment info — protected by whatever password you chose years ago.

The reuse problem

Because remembering a unique password for every account is unrealistic, most people reuse the same one or two passwords everywhere. Maybe with a small variation — adding a number at the end, swapping a letter for a symbol — but essentially the same password.

This feels practical. And it is, until one of those sites gets hacked. Then whoever got into that site has your password — and they're going to try it on your email, your bank, and everywhere else. This happens all the time.

A better way

This week, we're going to walk through what you can actually do about your passwords without it becoming a huge project. We'll cover why reuse is riskier than it seems, what a password manager actually is and whether it's right for you, how two-factor authentication works, and what to do if you think something's already been compromised.

One step at a time. Starting tomorrow.

If you want help reviewing your account security or getting set up with better tools, PCRescue can walk through it with you remotely. No judgment — most people haven't done any of this.