Category: Passowrd

How to Protect your privacy online

Paul

Privacy - Privacy Online

Online Data

52 percent of respondents shared personally identifying information through social media sites.  — Dan Raffer

Do you know how much of your personal data is out there? There are many people who will not know just how much data is available on the internet. You could literally find information about a person where they live, their phone number and even their email address if you really know where to go to search for this information. No I am not joking, it is really not hard to find this information and that is what most people just don’t realize.   As you might think, most people are leaking their information in many ways from their hair color to their favorite food on social media sites and this just as dangerous as you might not realize.

Hearing what I just told you, how do you feel about it?

“Most browsers — including Chrome, Firefox and Safari — offer some sort of private browsing window.” Christian Stewart

You can protect your privacy somewhat by using this private browser such as Chrome’s Incognito window but this is only the first step to protect your privacy online. You should also disable third party cookies and also use a good privacy focused search engines such as duckduckgo (duckduckgo.com), or Wolframalpha (wolframalpha.com) to help keep people from tracking you. These are all good and will help you not be tracked as much on the internet and keep your privacy safe.

Be skeptical

More than 99 percent of threats observed required human interaction to execute. – Gamelearn

Did you know that it could be as simple as being very skeptical of any links you have been sent or browsing on the web. Not every link on the internet is safe for us to click. So How do you know if it is safe to click? These are good questions that need to really be thought out before you click any link you want. Some of the common questions I ask myself are:

  • Did I receive this link without being told?

  • Was it a popup message or something like that?

  • Do I know the person who sent it?

  • Is the URL link hidden from my site?

  • Was it sent on a Social Media site?

If you answered yes to at least one of these questions you should be very cautious to click the link. Most of the time if you received a message saying your system is infected you would be quick to click that link but that would be the wrong. Most virus authors will pray on your emotions and social engineer the attacks that will get them the most results.

Stop with the easy passwords

This is the most valuable tip I can give you, everyone who’s anyone will not create complex passwords because we aren’t complex. Humans especially when it comes to passwords will not create a really hard password because it will be hard for them to remember it. Definitely don’t write down your passwords for others to see. You’ve seen shows or movies like Ready Player One. If you seen the movie Ready Player One, in the movie Sorrento leaves his password on the rig and well you know the rest but it makes a great point that there are better ways to keep your passwords safe. I recommend using a password vault or a password manager that will do the job. I currently use Lastpass for all my needs but I am sure there are other free password managers that will create, encrypt, and even save those passwords for the next time you visit a website. Any good password manager is really going to be better at create a unique password than you would.

Use 2 factor authentication

It’s time to use 2 factor authentication. It is something you have and not something you know, you should make it extremely hard for any key-logger or other such methods from controlling your account. This is where 2 factor authentication comes into play, they might know your password but they will also need to know or have a way to authenticate in other ways. So it is best to have this turned on even if you are using your cell phone, it will provide another layer of protection and will keep your accounts safe.

When it comes to privacy, it can be a big struggle just to keep your information safe. There are several ways you can keep it from those big baddies that want to use your information for piracy and identity theft. We can never really understand why but we can at least work hard at making sure our information isn’t in the wrong hands.

Are you treating your passwords like Underwear?

Paul
Really nothing like underwear!

I am perplexed

Saw this meme or poster that I found on Facebook has me thinking about password security.   What is good way to tell people about Password security?  Is it as simple as this poster says?  We could use some really bad passwords over and over again!  Let’s explore the really good questions of this.   I’ll talk about what might be very well help with your password security.  Although these are just a few that stick out in my mind but they do help create a strong password.   I know I’ve talked about some of these in the past but sometimes it is good to talk about them again.

Password Manager

Now a days if you don’t have a good password manager than you are really not keeping your passwords safe.   Like the poster says we usually write down our passwords on a piece of paper on  the desk.   Instead we should securely put them in a vault somewhere.   Should we use something like Google to hold our passwords?   That’s a good start.   I’d be willing to bet they do a really good job of it.  I personally love Lastpass and have used it for years and years.   Even though there is a lot of balancing acts with a password manager and your lifestyle.   It can be helpful to keep your passwords safe and away from prying eyes.

Keep away from easy passwords

Easy guessable passwords will make you loose your accounts quicker than anything.   So keep away from those weak passwords and passwords that anyone can guess.  I did talk about those in the past about the top ten passwords that people use and you can bet most hackers will use them to try to get into yours or other accounts.   Using a good password manager plus letting them create a hard password is essential to keeping your accounts safe from hackers.

Two factor Authentication

I’ve always said having two factor authentication can also help you prevent your account from being hacked.   It will prevent a hacker from getting instant access to your account and even warn you that you’ve been hacked.   You can use something like YubiKey but since most of us have cell phones than I just use sms for verification.  I’ve even recommend Google Authentication for this purpose.   It is almost like a one time password and can save you money in the long run!

Don’t use same passwords

I have talked about this in the past also, but you should never use the same password twice on any of your really important websites like banking or electricity websites.  You can keep up to date on if you need to change your passwords by checking Have I been pwned website and seeing if you might need to change your password.   It’s never a bad idea to go and check every year to see if you need to change them.

If you are like me, you are constantly trying to keep your passwords safe and secure.   Do you have any recommendations or suggestions.   Why not leave a comment?  I’d love for you to share and talk about how you keep yourself safe.

You’ve got hacked thanks to Twitter : Don’t “email me at”

Paul

I was reading a blog post about Spammers Harvesting Sorrow From Twitter.

Something came to my mind, so I did a little research and a lot of thinking and it finally came to me. It is easy for someone to find your email and use it for there own means. There are several different scenarios I can come up with:

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  • Impersonating someone you know —  It is quite simple to find out who we know and who we follow.  You can always find someone who you don’t know the email address of and make it seem like your them to get even more information from the person.

  • Receiving Viruses, Trojans, or worms —   Although if you have a good Anti-virus this one won’t be getting to you but  according to ESET : 10 percent of computer users didn’t know if they had anti-virusware installed. This means that there are going to be some success for malware authors to send out a virus to every who twitters there email address and still have success.

  • Try to guess your password —  If they have your email address, which is almost like your SSN in some respects, they could go to Facebook and try to get into your account by doing a Dictionary attack or a Brute Force Attack.  They may even try to hack into your email address just to get access to all the other accounts.

I am sure I am going to miss others that could possibly happen but this isn’t about what could happen this is about ways to prevent this type of stuff.   Chris Pirillo seems to think that if we use the “AT” and “dot” in place of the real things that no Bot would be able to figure that.   I say no because this is the easiest thing for a bot to do is to copy everything after the “Email me at”  and put it in a text file.   Then the person harvesting the email address would just have to go through and find all them that have the “dot” and “at” and change them to what they should be.  I have been watching the search terms for the last few hours and it seems there is a new person posting there email address every 5 minutes or so.  Have you don’t it in the past?

In short, if you want someone to email you it is always best just to send a Direct message to them so no other eyes can see it.  I’d also suggest installing some [intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”]Free Anti-virus and Firewalls[/intlink] if you haven’t already to better help your protect your personal information.  Remember only you can prevent from getting your personal information stolen.