Every day, the world is becoming more digitised than it was a second before. As good things keep on happening, data leaks and hacking keep increasing. Cybercrime has led to people losing more money and essential information and sabotaging people’s relationships. To statistics, if people lose more as they gain a norm, here are five tips on safeguarding your information and your devices from any risk.
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strong passwords
Access to emails, websites, apps, and even the phone itself requires password input. Weak passwords are easy to detect by hackers, and therefore they might have access to whatever they are trying to get. A good password should contain a mixture of lower and uppercase letters, special characters, and numerical and should be long enough. An important thing to note is that it is not a wise thing to input the same password to safeguard different accounts, as that will put everything that you own into jeopardy. Before using an app to set passwords and lock options, it is essential to ensure that it is licensed and a reputable provider offers it to prevent you from installing malware into your devices. While creating your password, it would help to create a password that is far away from your essential information like your name, phone number or even birth date. Please do not use your browser to store your passwords since even when it is encrypted, it is easy to decrypt them. Instead, you might choose to use software to keep your password.
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Pay attention to emails received
The most common way that hackers have been able to have is by phishing emails. It means that a hacker sends you an email pretending to be a company with a domain from the original one in a way that, if you do not look closely, then you might fall victim. You might be sent a form for you to fill out, and that way, the hacker can get your most sensitive data. Your data might be sold to a third party which might be used for illegal practices, which might include purchases or even stealing money from your bank account.
When you receive email attachments from an email address you do not recognise, recheck before you download them as it might be another trick from hackers. The hackers can damager devices by deleting files or even transferring confidential information to people that are not warranted to have them. Pay attention to every sender of an email, and if you feel like you don’t understand the news sent, then that’s your sign to block the email address and report spam.
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stay away from popups
While browsing and you see a popup of a video, photo it even just a statement, do not click on it. You will never know what lies behind pop up until you click it. It may appear as an advertisement popup that contains malware, and even if you click on close the window, there is no guarantee that it will close. The close button might download a file to your device if it is a pop up with bad intentions. To avoid these popups, you might want to update your security settings on your web browser to ensure that pop-ups are blocked.
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Use two-factor authentication
As the word suggests, it refers to a second step to verify that it is you trying to log in. While login into an app or a website, after entering your password, you might get a message on your phone to confirm or a code being sent to you that you have to input. The two-step authentication process adds another layer of security, which reduces the risk of having someone to login into your accounts. The strategy picks up specific phone details like phone model and the type, and your phone number to ensure that whenever any other device tries to log in, you will get a notification on your phone to authorise. It, therefore, means that once you change or add a machine, you will have to log in and state your change of device.
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Only use HTTPS sites
HTTP is a default protocol of the web. Any website that has HTTP has no encryption and therefore allows browsers to request web pages from servers. Consequently, it means that there can be a third party between the client and the server, and thus the data can be manipulated. Hackers use that to fake websites that might involve money, like online gaming apps. To ensure that whatever information you put in is safe, look for sites and apps with HTTPS, like freespingratis.it is a secure version of HTTP since it follows some security principles, end-to-end encryption.
