Keeping your data safe and secure can be herculean, going by the threats that abound online. Apart from the data breach threats that abound online, many blue-chip companies make use of data collected from their website visitors to market their services and better improve their experience.
Hackers have taken advantage of the loopholes that unsuspecting web surfers leave online to break into their systems and steal sensitive data for malicious use. Many people have had their credit card information stolen and their accounts cleared due to these breaches. Companies have lost important data due to these breaches and had their business secrets stolen by rivals. The major question at hand is. How then can you protect your data and keep it safe and secure?
Cloud Services
One of the best ways to protect your data is to back up your data using cloud services. Most cloud services allow customers to store their important data online, which they access remotely anywhere in the world as long as they have access to internet facilities. When you make use cloud-based services, you can be sure to recover your data easily even when you lose them on your device or hardware or get attacked by malicious hackers.
Visit only trusted websites
To better protect your system from attack and safeguard your data, it’s vital for you to only trusted sites. How do you know a site you can trust? Lookout for the signs of an SSL certificate installation. Websites with SSL certificate installation usually have HTTPS icon in their address bar. Https simply means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. So whatever sensitive data you are sharing on the site is usually encrypted. Encrypted data are difficult to hack and are protected from unauthorized access.
Firewalls
Firewalls basically help to protect your browsers and servers against unauthorized transmission of information and data. There are rules that firewalls follow, which help to stop malicious programs from connecting or accessing your servers or external servers. You can also deploy built-in routers to protect your data and ensure you don’t suffer any data breaches.
Employ the use of strong password
Passwords are very important when it comes to data protection and security. They help to prevent unauthorized access to data and help to protect them against malicious persons. However, these crafty people are getting more sophisticated by the day.
They employ advanced hacking tools that make it easy for them to crack weak passwords or commonly used passwords. That’s why it’s imperative that you avoid the use of commonly used passwords such as abcd, 1234, 4321 and the likes. Although they are much easier to remember, these weak passwords are usually cracked without much fuss.
Try to employ the use of alphanumeric passwords, with a combination of upper and lowercase letters, including special characters. A password with all the attributes mentioned above will be extremely difficult to crack. Try to change them frequently as well. That way, you’ll be able to raise your security level a notch higher.
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Try to Activate a Two-factor Authentication
The two-factor authentication is designed to provide an additional layer of security to prevent any unauthorized user from accessing your personal information. It usually requires a second verification step to authenticate users in other for them to access their account. You could be required to register your phone number when opening your accounts. This phone number might be used to authenticate suspicious logins.
Usually, you’ll need to enter your passwords as usual when trying to login into your account. When the site doesn’t recognize your browser or IP address, a pin or code may be sent to your phone number which you’ll then be required to enter to gain access to your account. The two-factor authentication system makes it very difficult for unauthorized users to gain access to your information or data.
Avoid opening spam emails
Spam emails are very handy tools used by hackers to bait unsuspecting internet users into clicking malicious links. Phishing works hand-in-hand with spam, and it is used to bait users into visiting fake sites where they can be milked-off their valuable login credentials and passwords. Some of these fake sites may appear legit but will prompt users to input their credit card information in other to acquire a product or service.
Once you input your card information or login credentials, your account is then hacked and your money cleared or private information stolen. To safeguard against this kind of attacks, always ensure you only read emails from trusted sites or individuals.
Do away with your old data
There are times that information or certain data become obsolete. We usually leave them stored in old hard drives or other storage devices we hardly make use of. While these measures may seem prudent on our part, many times, hackers or malicious persons use old information to gather intelligence on our business or day-to-day activities.
The information gotten can make It very easy for hackers to breach your security and steal your valuable information. Try to ensure that you erase and shred hard drives used to store old information. It might not be enough just to delete your old data; you may need to also destroy the hard drives, especially if you won’t be needing them anytime soon.
Conclusion
There are many other measures you can use to better safeguard your data and private information. The ones mentioned above are the commonly used measures you can employ to protect your data and information from unauthorized use. They are easily implementable and wouldn’t cost you much in terms of resources. Data breaches are becoming more rampant these days, owing to massive strides made by these malicious persons or hackers to compromise our data security. We must try to keep up with these threats, so they don’t get a chance to ruin our businesses and integrity.