Did you know your credit card is worth up to $20,000 to hackers? Your hotel loyalty account up to $1400? Your iTunes at least $20?
What does this mean?
Even your less important online accounts are worth money! And Twenty Dollars is Twenty Dollars!
Don’t for a second think your accounts are safe—whether you have a lot of money in them or not.
Even simple information like names and addresses give hackers a good start at stealing your personal information.
So what are you to do?
Just to recap from last week, you should really shore up how you keep your personal information offline before addressing how you protect yourself online.
But you also need to keep your data safe online!
I’ve come up with 9 of the biggest ways you can make sure people aren’t getting into your accounts, accessing your sensitive information and using it at your expense.
- Give personal info on encrypted websites only—websites that aren’t encrypted don’t take the right precautions to keep your data safe. How can you tell if a site is encrypted? Look at the url. If it begins with https instead of http, the site is secured. Only enter data on sites that are https. Before you enter personal data into forms online, double check the url to make sure it is the one you’ve intended. Hackers have learned that setting up dummy sites with minor differences in URL can help them steal data from folks that aren’t paying enough attention. For instance, instead of amazon.com, a hacker will use “amaz0n.com” and pick up a significant amount of traffic from folks making simple keystroke errors (we all do this sometimes!).
- Secure passwords—longer and tougher the better. 10 characters is good, but 12 is better. Mix letters, numbers and special chars. If you need a refresher, see our tips on getting good passwords.
- Don’t overshare on your social media accounts—we all love to share our experiences with friends online. But the key to social media is not to over share. If your Facebook or Twitter account provide the answers to your security questions, you give away personal information—phone numbers, addresses, etc.—that give the bad guys too much to work with.
- Backup your files— even photos, so you know exactly what was stolen in the event someone gets access into your computer and phone. If your computer gets hacked and your files ransomed [link to ransomware], you at least have all of those important memories, photos and documents safe and sound in a backup.
- Know your privacy settings—often times, you’re airing more personal information to the masses than you ever anticipated. Check your security settings on ANY site you exchange information to see that you aren’t sharing more than you thought. Here are a some links to security settings for some of the biggies:
- Purge data—just like you clean out your closet, you have lots of sensitive data (texts, emails, photos, etc) on your devices you probably will never use, but could haunt you down the road. Regularly erase things you don’t need on those devices (even if you choose to keep the files/info somewhere else). Why store it on your most visible devices?
- Reset passwords if a company was breached—passwords and credential lists are relatively straight forward for hackers to find. If you have an online account with a site that was recently hacked, make sure you change out your password. And be sure to store those passwords in a safe place!
- Automate your software updates, update anti-malware, operating system updates, software updates—when Microsoft, Apple or whatever software you have on your machine or device has updates, it’s not normally because they’ve created more shiny and cool tools for you to play with. It’s because someone has identified bugs in the current version—most likely related to security! Caution: if you’re on a business network—make sure you have someone managing and approving updates for you.
- Secure wireless network at home and work—at home or work, hackers are interested in getting into your network. Either to simply steal your bandwidth or your personal info, you need to make sure you have a firewall and that your network is password protected. The harder you make it for the bad guys to get in, the more likely they’ll focus on someone down the street with their network doors wide open than waste time trying to figure out how to break into your Fort Knox!
And remember, if you have any questions about keeping personal information safe—whether it’s for business or home, feel free to reach out! We care about your business, but we also want to keep you and your team safe wherever you might be!
