If you have been watching the news for the last few months, you might have noticed an uptick in the reports about data breaches and ransomware attacks by cybercriminals. The victims of these cyber-attacks do not number in their hundreds but are often in their millions and while the danger might seem far away to most internet users, the reality is that you can be a victim of these attacks at any point in your day too. With major companies like yahoo and t mobile coming out with statements that they have been hacked, it is time we too as internet users pay attention to our online security and ensure that we are protected to the best of our abilities.
Regularly change your passwords
While this might be difficult to do for all of your online accounts, it is a good idea to do this to your most important accounts, such as your online banking account details and so on. If you have any doubt that an account of yours has been compromised, you should change your passwords without failure. Ensure that they are not easy to guess. For an instance, avoid using number sequences like “1234” in your password and do not include your name or any other format that can be guessed easily. Many websites, both paid websites and free websites allow you to generate hard to crack passwords.
Secure your website
If you are an e-commerce website owner, the last thing you will want is to leak out all your customer details and credit card details. You should hire a magneto developer from a reputed magneto development company to update your site with all the required security measures to ward off any malicious attempts.
Always check your statements
Identity theft does not always mean opening a new card. In some cases, thieves get access to your existing cards and use it for transactions, which is why it’s a good idea to go through all the transactions in your statements for anything unusual. By reporting it beforehand you can reduce the amount stolen and maybe even get the charges reversed. Other ways to prevent identity theft includes being careful about sharing sensitive date through emails and over the phone. Think twice before opening links through emails and make use of an up to date antivirus software to protect yourself from malware. Another commonly forgotten area is public Wi-Fi networks. For those who do not know, public Wi-Fi networks make it quite easy for hackers to access your device and it is best that you do not share confidential details over such networks.
Increase awareness at the work place
There have been quite a few times where an unintentional accident by an employee gave hackers a way into the system. Nowadays, hackers also focus on subtle methods such as a seemingly innocent email rather than using force. You can avoid this by educating the employees at the work place and teach them the most common ways that hackers try to gain access and what they should do and shouldn’t do.