Protect Yourself Online

We risk being hacked every day. This risk can expose our financial, retail, and personal online accounts to intruders for malicious use, so it is important to be able to identify weak points and know how to protect them.

Know your email inbox.

Email is a potential area for malicious behavior to occur. Do not open emails from unknown people. Avoid opening attachments or clicking on internet links from unsolicited emails. Exercise caution with emails that have embedded links and images. Delete emails that make outlandish claims or offers that are too good to be true, just never even open them. 

Take precautions on social networks.

Social networking sites and their apps are convenient means for sharing personal information with family and friends. Open sharing can increase your risks. To protect yourself avoid posting information such as your home address, phone number, places of employment any other personal information. Limit the access to information to friends only and verify any new friend request. Review the security policies available from your social network provider quarterly or when the terms of use policy changes. Opt out of exposing personal information to search engines. Take precautions concerning any unsolicited request and links.

Guard your account access.

Keep your passwords secure and take steps to minimize misuse of password recovery options. Use different passwords for your accounts, not the same one for everything. Disable the feature that allows websites or programs to remember passwords. Change your passwords periodically. A standard password recovery method for sites is challenge questions. To prevent an attacker from leveraging any personal information, consider answering challenge questions with lies that you can easily remember, but that someone who looks up your history wouldn’t know. Avoid storing passwords and answers to challenge questions in plain text. If available use multi-factor authentication for logging into websites. Example of this is a passcode or pin is emailed, texted, or even provided to you on phone call.

Exercise caution when using public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Many locations such as coffee shops, hotels, libraries, and airports have wireless hotspots for customers to access the internet. The security of these hotspots cannot be guaranteed. Exercise caution when accessing any personal or financial accounts is necessary. When you can, use your cellular network to access the internet instead of a public hotspot. These days most of us have 4G cell network service that can be used for internet access instead of a public Wi-Fi hotspot. 

The next time you connect to a public Wi-Fi hotspot, post something, or email, remember to be aware of your online presence.