We’re constantly reminded about the need to be secure online, but just how concerned are we about protecting our personal data? According to new research from Ofcom – nowhere near enough.

The UK racked up an incredible £1.8bn in financial losses from cyber crime in 2012 and 12.5m of us were estimated to be victims. Despite these alarming losses, over half of those surveyed by Ofcom admitted they relied on a single password for their entire digital life, often spreading across multiple banking, email, shopping and social media accounts.

If your password is guessed or hacked by an outside party, imagine the digital destruction and stress caused.

This lax attitude goes one step further – especially when you discover our most popular passwords in the UK are ‘123456’ and ‘password’. You might lock the front door when you leave the house, but too many of us are leaving the equivalent of a signed blank cheque on the digital welcome mat.

Criminals will attempt to get their hands on your details in a number of ways – by sneaking a piece of ‘malware’ onto your computer – a file that is often tucked away by criminals with legitimate software from a third party website – or by ‘phishing’ – sending an email attempting to mislead you into supplying personal data. Before entering personal information into a web page, you can see whether the page is secure by looking for ‘https://’ in front of the address, or a padlock in the address bar. This means the page is encrypted and the information is only shared with the computer at the other end.

We can all take simple steps to make our passwords harder to guess or be stolen. Many of us have a little phrase personal to us – so why not take the second letter from each word to make your password. If you have many accounts and use the internet a lot, you might want to consider a service like 1Password which is available for your computer, smartphone and tablet; this costs £35 a year and securely creates virtually unbreakable passwords.

Also, spending a few minutes each week keeping your software and operating system up to date will help close off the entry points that cyber criminals exploit. Stay alert – and avoid becoming another victim.