In August of this year, the New York Times reported on the largest theft of online credentials to date—more than 1.2 billion username and password combinations and 500 million e-mail addresses from approximately 420,000 websites around the globe. Uncovered by Hold Security, an information security and investigations company, the theft is believed to have been perpetrated by a Russian gang of cyber criminals that the company has dubbed CyberVor ("vor" meaning "thief" in Russian).

You and your clients have probably taken certain precautions to prevent the theft of your financial information. But what about guarding against medical identity theft?

Unfortunately, medical identity theft is a real possibility. A thief can steal your personal and insurance information to see a doctor, obtain prescriptions, file claims, or sell on the black market. If the criminal's health information becomes conflated with yours, it can affect your credit and leave you with unpaid bills that may require legal action.

Like you, I hate passwords. They are a nuisance, a waste of time, and inevitably hackable—unless they are complex combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols. And who has time to think up, let alone remember, a different complex password for each website they use? The result, of course, is that most of us use passwords that are easy to create and remember, which often means weak.