Contents List
When shopping online, you need to be wary of scams to save your money and identity
People can have big consequences if their data is obtained by hackers. Cybercriminals can use your personal information, use your credit card and even steal your identity.
People who rush and pay less attention are the main targets of cybercriminals. Be careful where you shop, it is also not uncommon for fraudsters to set up fake e-commerce sites to profit. Some things that are in high demand will be priced high.
It is vital that you have unique passwords with a combination of characters and numbers and that you change them regularly. Password Manager helps you save the information you use to log in. It also registers and you don’t have to worry about getting lost or missing. Password managers improve the security and safety of the browser – Google Chrome. They assess the strength of the password and provide immediate access. Password managers securely store data. Increase the level of security, do not be under pressure and do not be in awkward situations, use all the tips and get a password manager.
To provide additional protection for your account, you should include two-factor authentication (2FA) where possible. This is a way for the service you use to check that you are the person you claim to be when you sign up.
Avoid public Wi-Fi. Using public Wi-Fi to shop online can be convenient, but it’s not safe, so you could compromise your data. Cybercriminals often target places like this to be able to steal confidential information from users, such as passwords or credit card information, making users vulnerable to identity theft and fraud.
Think about what you publish
Think twice before uploading or downloading something from the Internet. Is it necessary for everything about your life to be online? According to your posts, cybercriminals create your profile even easier if you become a victim of an attack. Everything is published online, available in the whole world. Posts stay permanently online, you can’t delete them! Do your friends, whose photos you post on the Internet, want to be there? The second most important privacy policy restricts access to your accounts. Privacy settings are a mandatory part of every social network. Read them before creating your account and embark on an adventure of sharing moments from your life with other internet users. Online games, social networks, as well as all platforms provide several opportunities to keep your privacy at a higher level. Don’t accept people you don’t know as friends!
The additional level of protection
It often happens that applications and individual platforms want to access your data such as photos, contacts, messages, and cameras to enable their download and use. Before you give your consent without thinking, consider whether it is OK for the application to have access to your personal information and whether it is indeed your case, risk necessary, because cybercriminals are good at obtaining personal data. In your free time, find out about the permissions you give to the services to use the applications and whether such a “compromise” is okay.
Security of electronic transactions
Online shopping and banking are safe and easy if you follow the guidelines. You also need to approach common sense. If you’re shopping online, look for clear signs that it’s a trusted company: If you’re using an online auction site, a few simple steps are enough to make sure: You should learn to identify cases that could potentially lead to this to be deceived: if your computer becomes infected, it can lead to theft of your identity and life habits, theft of passwords to access online services, access to a fake site and leaving personal data, the possibility of hacking a wireless network. Take care of chats and emails, because threats lurk everywhere in the online world! Update your computer regularly and use modern search engines to back up your files.
Each website collects information about you and your activities and stores this information on your device in the form of small files called cookies. Cookies make the website more user-friendly, help the website work more reliably and monitor visitor activities.
Although they are often associated only with user tracking, cookies also have their advantages. They identify you on the website and save your settings (if any). For example, a hotel reservation website may remember the currency you chose to pay for, and if you check the “Remember me” option on your social network login page, you won’t have to enter your information every time you visit the site. When you return to the website, it checks for the appropriate cookies on your device, recognizes you, and automatically allows you to access your account.
However, in addition to having features that are useful to website visitors, cookies allow online services to collect user data to make suggestions based on them and display relevant ads. Such cookies do not have to be just cookies of the website you have visited, but also companies with which the site owners have entered into partnership agreements. Such cookies are called third-party cookies, and they are the reason why many think that cookies are just tracking tools.
The most effective solution is not to deal with the settings of each website individually, but to configure everything in the browser, in the settings menu where you can block cookies. If necessary, you can make exceptions for some websites.
How to protect yourself from phishing
Unfortunately, there is no real cure for phishing attacks, except for user caution, which should be at the level of paranoia, and here’s why. This threat is constantly evolving because fishermen from the Internet are constantly changing their tactics of attack. In recent times, personalised phishing attacks are especially popular, which are aimed at employees of certain companies and institutions.
There are many ways in which victims can bite the bait: access to public Wi-Fi, logging on to a fake website, clicking on a link in a promising email offering discounts, and more. It is impossible to list all possible scenarios. If you always keep all this in mind, you will probably successfully avoid the traps of fishermen, no matter how creative they were in devising new ways of cheating.