Protecting Your Accounts: Passwords, OTPs and Two-Factor Authentication

Student email, college portal, and social media accounts are common targets because they're often reused across platforms and less carefully secured than banking accounts. Practical steps that meaningfully reduce risk: - Use a unique password for every account. If one service is breached, and breaches happen even to large companies, a reused password lets attackers walk straight into your other accounts. - Use a password manager. Trying to remember dozens of unique, strong passwords isn't realistic, a password manager (many have free tiers) generates and stores them for you. - Turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever it's offered, especially email, since your email is usually the reset point for every other account. - Never share an OTP, even with someone claiming to be a college official, a company recruiter, or tech support. An OTP is only ever meant for you to use directly. - Be careful with "exam portal" and college login credentials. These are often reused across other services by students, and college portal breaches do happen. - Log out of shared or public computers, especially in cyber cafes or shared hostel computers, and avoid saving passwords in a shared browser profile. If you suspect an account has been compromised, change its password immediately, log out of all other sessions from the account's security settings, and check whether that same password was reused anywhere else.