August 21, 2020
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0Fully-Fledged Guide On Ways To Protect Your Data Online
Do you want a comprehensive guide on ways to protect your data online? Well, you’re in luck! We’ve collected essential methods and options for protecting yourself from third parties and hacker attacks on the internet.
We’ve already touched on the topic ‘Why do we need to protect data?’ In our article 5 Reasons Why Online Privacy Matters, you can drive into this topic more.
Here we’ll touch on the most hot-button issue — ways to protect your data online. Why is it important to protect data? It’s simple. Today, the internet affects a large part of our lives. We spend about 70% of its in the online space.
Unfortunately, many criminals seek to exploit our online lives by accessing the data for their own, illegal ends. This can open us up to online scams and attacks that can cause financial problems and affect other aspects of our lives, such as our credit rating. This doesn’t even consider the additional stress that an online attack can have on our lives.
Therefore, the tips that we’ve collected below will show you ways to protect your data online.
The best ways to protect your data
1. Use the function of data encryption
In 2020, data encryption is one of the most important features that should be built into the tools you’re using on the internet. Strong encryption means using a secret code that consists of an infinite possible number of characters. Such a code is impossible to crack.
For example, you know a famous mail system that uses open source code to encrypt transmitted and received users’ data. This encryption is performed using the OpenPGP encryption standard. In general, this method is reliable. However, you can read the recent news about the leak of user data used by applications built on a similar system.
So, it is much better to use closed source code, which has a more stable operation. Access to closed source code is limited, so the risk of a hacker attack is reduced several times.
We’ve already compared Open Code vs Closed Code. In the article, we’ve analyzed each of these methods from different points of view and made our own conclusion. Read and choose the most reliable one.
Therefore, don’t forget to use the data encryption function to protect your data on the net.
2. Use two-factor authentication
Two-factor authentication is a feature that provides additional data protection to prevent any attempt to hack your account if your password is compromised. It requires entering additional data other than just your standard password.
As a rule, this feature is available for most popular applications, systems, and services. It helps confirm a person’s identity and restricts access to private data by third parties.
3. Protect your wireless home and work Internet
One of the main things you need to do is to set a strong password on your home or work internet. This action will restrict third parties’ access to your data.
In addition, you can completely hide the public access to your wireless network from outsiders. In the settings, you can disable the broadcast function of your network name — SSID. This way, you will protect access to your router.
4. Use the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
The Principle of Least Privilege means that the best option is to access the internet without administrator rights unless required for certain tasks. Using these rights makes your computer more vulnerable to hacker threats.
Surfing the internet with administrator privileges can expose your system to attacks that could harm your computer or hard drive that stores your important information. In the worst case, all your data can be copied and formatted later.
5. Use different passwords for your accounts and services
At the first stage of data protection, it is important to choose a reliable and robust password to protect your data from hacking. Therefore, you shouldn’t use the same password for all social networks, devices, and email services.
Otherwise, you risk opening access for a hacker to all your actions and data on the internet. So, you should think about a complex and reliable password that will include both numbers and letters.
In our blog, we’ve already touched upon the topic of Funny Passwords. There, we’ve collected a selection of passwords from different social networks and explained the importance of using strong passwords.
6. Make purchases using reliable shopping sites
Today, you can buy almost anything you might want without leaving your house. All you need is a stable internet connection and a trusted online store. You have to agree, it’s the most convenient way to make purchases because it takes just a few minutes.
However, the variety of online stores that exist today has given rise to various hacking attacks. As a rule, they are aimed at copying your data when you enter your bank card details for payment.
Therefore, you should choose only trusted sites and online stores that guarantee the safety of your entered data.
7. Have a data backup
This advice will slip into a different frame of mind. In the question ‘What should you do if your identity is stolen?’
Let’s imagine that your data or your company’s data was stolen. Do you agree that the time you spend on recovery will be more valuable than the stolen data?
According to statistics, about 68% of businesses lose more by recovering stolen data. This includes not only time expenditures but also financial costs.
The biggest cost for most companies will be loss of business from customers not trusting them after a data breach.
Therefore, you need to backup all your data in advance. So that in the event of a hacker attack, you’ll have a backup of your documents and files.
Let’s fight against Invasion of Privacy! Protect your data using the best and most reliable safety tool.
8. Don’t click on links in emails
Of course, every day we receive dozens of emails with various inside links. These can be messages from banks and various services and even messages from our friends and relatives. About half of the incoming messages contain some type of links to internet resources.
However, it is not safe to blindly click on sent links. You should enter the address manually in the address bar. Why? Incoming messages with links can be a phishing attack. By clicking on the link, you may find yourself on a legitimate site, but all your data will be copied by criminals.
If you enter the link in the address bar manually, your data will not be copied by a special program. But if you simply click the link, the dangerous program will work against you.
9. Don’t download files from untrusted sites
On the internet, in addition to legal sites, there are a huge number of illegal and dangerous resources that position themselves as safe. However, don’t blindly trust them and download the files you need from the first site you come across.
You risk downloading a file or document with a virus program or a program that will copy all your personal information as a gift. Such programs can monitor your internet activity in the future.
Remember the old proverb: ‘Trust, but verify.’
10. Turn off your GPS
Turning off the GPS function will help you keep your internet browsing confidential. It means that all the services and apps that you use will not be able to discover your location.
Why is it important? Enabled GPS has access to the information, whether you are at home or not. In other words, your personal space is subject to offline attacks. In addition, it is not pleasant to realize that anyone can track your movement route.
Turning off the GPS is an easy way to stop geo-tagging and any danger of revealing your location.
Do you want more working methods to protect data from any cyber threat? Read Stay Safe Online and follow the listed ways of protecting yourself.
