It's no secret that your information has never been more accessible than it is in this digital age, and at the same time, more cybercriminals are now lurking to find just the slightest bit of vulnerabilities to steal your sensitive data and use it for malicious purposes.
Prevent Your Privacy from Hackers
These cybercriminals are seemingly always one or two steps ahead of online privacy regulations, and relying on laws is simply not sufficient. This is why we have to be proactive and start doing the required cybersecurity best practices to protect your privacy from hackers and cybercriminals.
- At least 8-10 characters long
- Includes a combination of uppercase, lowercase, symbols, numbers, and space if the system allows
- Something you are: face ID, iris/retina scan, fingerprint, etc.
- Something you know: a second password, PIN, answer to a security question, etc.
- Something you have: a physical dongle, etc.
- Consider keeping your social media profiles private. Unless you absolutely need your posts to be made public, consider restricting your social media to friends only and anyone on the internet. Similarly, limit to who can send you friend requests when the social media network allows.
- Unsubscribe from email lists. There might be old email lists that you don't even read anymore. Also, consider using a secondary email address for activities like inquiries for quotes, one-time purchases, etc. Keep your personal and business email safe.
- Configure access. Turn of location sharing, face recognition, and other features that might affect your privacy on your social media accounts.
- Post carefully. Be very careful not to accidentally post something that might compromise your sensitive information. For example, never post your phone number or your SSN publicly, and be very careful when sharing photos of your house and your neighborhood.
- Configure your IoT devices. If you have devices like smart doorbells or smart cameras that are programmed to automatically obtain information, make sure to password protect them accordingly. Make the habit of regularly updating their software and remove devices you no longer use from your network. If possible, run a separate network/Wi-Fi to power them.
- Besides the bad bots operated by hackers and cybercriminals, there are good bots that can be beneficial for your network. We wouldn't want to block, for example, Googlebot which will effectively prevent our site from being indexed by Google. So, the bot management solution must be able to properly differentiate traffic from good bots and bad bots.
- Malicious bots are getting better at impersonating humanlike behaviors like randomized typing patterns, non-linear mouse movements, and others. Differentiating malicious bots from valuable, legitimate human traffic can be a major challenge.
- Don't download suspicious apps on your phone. Especially if the app doesn't come from App Store or Google Play Store.
- Disable 'run as administrator'. Do this on all your devices, and don't jailbreak/root your phone unless you are absolutely sure.
- Deactivate autofill. While autofill is a convenient time-saving feature, it can be exploited by hackers.
- Use VPN. When accessing public Wi-FI, especially when you are sending/receiving confidential information or making sensitive transactions.
- Don't use default passwords. On your routers, and also on administrator pages for platforms like WordPress and other devices. Also, change the default username since there are usernames that show the type of device/network it's running on.
- Log out frequently. Make the habit of logging out when you've finished using an account. When you leave your account logged in in the background, it's a potential security vulnerability.
