It is very likely that you or someone you know has had one or multiple of their online accounts hacked into. It happens to everybody: individuals, small and big companies alike, can have disastrous consequences and makes you feel extremely vulnerable. In this three part post we will talk about some tips to give cyber-criminals a hard(er) time in their inevitable quest for easy money or their five minutes of glory.
While no security solution will ever be perfect and cyber-crime will always exist, each individual plays an important part in helping or hindering the act of cyber-theft. We will take a look at the most common and efficient ways to safeguard your information and identity. If you want to share some of your own tips, please feel free to leave a comment.
Set up a strong primary email account
Email is one of those things we have been using for so long that we almost take it for granted. It is also often a central point where many of our other online accounts report to. For this reason it can be a real pain or nightmare if we lose access to our email or if it gets compromised.
Many people don’t trust that their personal information will be kept secure and therefore often use fake data to register an account. While in itself it is not a bad idea for your own privacy’s sake, it can lead you into some troubles if one day you need to recover your account and one of the questions is for instance, your birthday… something that way back then you filled in completely randomly.
Additional information (phone, second email)
Don’t forget to update your alternate email when it changes! Because it is one of these settings that gets buried deep, we often forget to check if it is still current. A classic scenario is when you’re locked out of your account and it wants to send a recovery link to your other email address at the company you no longer work for, oops…
The infamous security questions
This is perhaps one of those security measures that can make you less protected than you were to begin with. While a lot of emphasis is put on the password and how it must be long, contain numbers, special characters, etc… nobody really seems to care that the same logic is not applied to your security questions and answers; In other words these security questions are just too basic and a little bit of googling about you might just reveal all these answers.
Instead I suggest that you create your own question which can actually demand multiple answers (and why not use special characters in there too?). Or you can just try to be a little more creative.
Important emails, documents
We often use our emails to store financial documents, other important data and, heaven forbid, passwords! And with pretty much unlimited storage we don’t really think about ever deleting anything. It is much safer to encrypt these documents and store them somewhere safe out of your inbox, or if they are no longer needed, to delete them.
Remember that the service provider can fail you too
Despite all the added precautions you may have taken, your account could still get hacked. Yahoo! has been in the spotlight for having several security flaws in its webmail client that lead to thousands of accounts getting compromised. Some reports say that the user had to click on a link in order to get hacked, while others suggest that accounts were hacked with no user interaction required.
Something you can do (so that at least your friends are not the first to tell you your account has been hacked) is to add yourself to your own contact list. The spammer might just blindly email everybody on there and receiving emails from yourself should tip you off.
Another feature you can check every now and again is your account activity in Gmail, Yahoo! Mail. All logins shown in there should be from your own computer and IP address. Anything else would be suspicious.
Do damage control
If your account has been hacked, you need to act promptly before more damage is done. One of the things to do is lock out the bad guys before they get a chance to do the same to you. Change your password and security questions immediately from a clean computer or device you trust (an active malware infection could just capture the new password again and again). Find out if your contacts have received email from you that appeared suspicious and let them know you were hacked. If they did click on links or open attachments from you recently, there is a chance they got hacked too.
Don’t stop here as most likely the bad guys didn’t either. Check all your other accounts and update them accordingly. If you are using online banking or do other transactions you will want to keep a watchful eye on those as well.
Share your experience. There is no need to be ashamed and keep that to yourself. Do the right thing by admitting to the facts if you did indeed make some mistakes and draw your own conclusions. The more people know about these things the better we all are. While security practices and technologies aren’t perfect there is no excuse for shooting yourself in the foot by not applying them.
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-Zach
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