Losing your wallet is really annoying.
After you realize it's happened, you've got to notify your bank and credit card company, cancel a bunch of stuff, and go through the hassle of replacing your driver's licence, social insurance card and those hilarious pictures of you and some old friend in one of those mall photo booths.
That's what bothers me the most, actually.
It's the idea that some anonymous person is rifling through all my personal info, thumbing through the pictures and trying to use my in-all-probability-expired coupon for a half-priced Big Mac.
The digital equivalent of losing your wallet is when one of your online gaming, email or social media accounts gets compromised, or to put it in Internet parlance, hacked.
That's what happened to 77 million Playstation gamers last month - as well as some 27 million Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) game subscribers - in one of the largest hacks in recent memory.
The cyber thieves got away with subscribers' names, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, gender, purchase history, and apparently some outdated credit card information from a few years ago.
This week, after almost a month offline, both the Playstation Network (PSN) and SOE games came back online - sort of.
Users logging back in to the PSN found they had to reset their passwords; however, the servers couldn't handle 77 million people re-setting at the same time, so Sony had to resort to turning the servers off every 30 minutes so administrators could keep up.
Users have been offered a welcome back package and the top three executives at the Japanese company even bowed in apology at a press conference because, quite frankly, this has shaken the gaming community's faith in Sony's ability to keep personal info safe.
It seems Sony isn't the only video game maker with shoddy security, though.
This week Square Enix, makers of the popular Final Fantasy, Deus Ex and Tomb Raider games, said the email addresses of up to 25,000 customers who had registered for product updates may have also been stolen during a separate hack.
The sad truth is you can never be absolutely sure about staying safe online, because there are always going to be hackers determined to get that information and compromise those systems for whatever reason.
The most you can do is take some small precautions to reduce the impact of such a breach.
First, always make sure you have different passwords for all your online accounts.
Also, some online security experts suggest lying about your personal details if possible.
For instance, I may give the correct year and month when asked for a birth date, but not the right day.
Don't try this with your bank, though.
They also don't accept "sure, what time?" under the space marked "sex."
Nobody appreciates juvenile humour anymore.
Additionally, consider having one credit card for everyday use and another low-limit card just for online purchases. Pre-paid credit cards are great for online use, as well.
It's unfortunate these cyber crimes had to happen (doubly so because I'm both a PSN and SOE customer), but at least it has shed a bright spotlight on online security.
As with these types of cyber crimes, it's likely the stolen info will be used for identity theft or to attempt email scams of some sort.
Now, how's that for annoying?
That's sort of like the person who found your lost wallet showing up at your door pretending to be that friend in the photo booth pictures and asking for half the price of a Big Mac!
