Having your e-presence compromised can bring great personal and financial strife to you. We live with a dichotomy of values where we would think twice before giving our birth date to a phone banking executive who is asking for that piece of information in order to conform your identity but freely leave that information for everybody to see on our social network profile.
Most of us are so casual with our personal information that we never really think about what all information we keep filling the forms with every time we create a new account on a new social networking site that we are never going to use. In a world where hacking is a present and real danger, it makes sense to be mindful of certain measures one can take to not suffer at the hands of cyber criminals who are lurking about every nook and corner waiting for the first sign of lethargy on our part to swindle you first off your information, then your reputation and privacy. Please check the fhe following steps:
Unused Profiles
Take time to make an inventory of all the social network, shopping site, news paper, magazine sites or any other site of place on internet where you have profiles or personal information of any sort. Ask yourself which of these profiles are an absolute requirement, the rest of them must be swiftly dispensed with. Any such profile is just waiting to be hacked either on account of a hacker having a personal grudge against your or as part of a large scale cyber attack that usually do away with large number of users information. Some of your online unused profiles could be on shopping sites or on a site where you purchased something using your credit card. Just a case in point, about 3 million Adobe accounts were compromised early this month that exposed among other things credit card and debit card numbers information.
Password
How easy to remember is your password? Where all do you use this one password? If you have made your password very predictable and easy to guess in a bid to make it easy to remember you deserve a big thanking gesture at the next hackers’ convocation. If you use a single password at a number of sites and services you deserve a hug from them as they really wish there more unassuming naïve users like you. Keep your passwords strong and hard to guess, check your password’s strength at sites like howsecureismypassword.net. If your using one password at all your social network, email and e banking sites, just wait till one of your many profiles get hacked, your beloved password exposed so the hacker would have convenient access to all your services and online financial activities. A case in point, some years back a hackers was caught trying to sell Facebook accounts for as amounts a meager as $25, and he had more than a million hacked usernames and passwords.
Suspicious Invitations
If you just received a message on Facebook, from one of your closest buddies to immediately go to a link and register there to get a free IPhone, delete that message or if you are really tempted, contact that close buddy of yours and ask him if he really sent that message. Phishing site are becoming a real challenge for security organizations as creators are of these site a using every trick in the book to lure people to such sites to steal their information. As a rule of thumb, all sites that promise to give you ridiculously discounted products or free goodies shall only give you only one thing for free, a security breach.
Miscellaneous
Add to the above list general awareness points like to not lend your flash drives and cameras etc, with personal information and photos to others without formatting them, changing your passwords every now and then, switching your Wi-Fi on WPA-2, and not sharing data on your mobile devices with unscrupulous users.
Protecting your identity or reputation on the net is not very different from protecting it in the real world. Just like it is not a good idea to distribute to the people you meet on the road or in the market, your personal photos, phone numbers, date of birth and seconds update of your activities, it is never a good idea to do the same in cyber world either no matter how ‘cool’ that might be.
Samaira is ‘Security Geek’ and very passionate about security software and internet technologies. She loves to check out latest software and other web services. Samaira mainly writes about Internet security issues, PC security etc.