Protection from hackers, how to approach this.
Here’s a few ideas.
Do not use the same password this may sound very obvious however, a lot of people still use the same password on every website. Including their bank accounts, this may seem convenient to the user, but it is also very convenient for hackers too. If the password is broken on one site it does not take much imagination to run the same password across other likely sites. the user also uses.
An additional step you can take to increase your protection against hackers is to use passwords that do not contain real words, for instance real names place names and dates. These are reasonably easy to crack, apparently if you know where to look on the internet you can find lists of passwords already cracked, that you can use make sure you include digits and non-alphanumeric characters in your passwords.
Multi-factor authentication.
Multi-factor or two-factor authentication is a process where your access is controlled by an additional method of identifying you in addition to your password in most cases this will involve the sending of an email or text message to authenticate you are who you say. This means for someone to be able to hack into your account they need your password and access to the email or phone number this authentication is sent to.
This method greatly reduces the possibility of a hacker having access to both of these resources and therefore increases your security greatly. It is highly recommended that this method is used where you can to simply make the hacker’s life more difficult.
Wi-fi security.
Most people use wi-fi connections at home or at work these connections are reasonably secure as long as a few basic principles are followed. First make sure that the wi-fi router administration password is a well-formed password and not left is an easy default. Make sure that all the security and encryption features are enabled on your wi-fi system hopefully these precautions will encourage a hacker to look elsewhere.
Now consider what we have just said and consider what happens if you use a free wi-fi connection in a hotel cafe or city service, you have very little if any control over what parts of your browsing are monitored or tracked, You are in effect on an open network this can be very dangerous in some cases if your network connections are not set up correctly your hard drive can be open to anyone else on that network at that time.
Even if you are confident of your security settings and that the public network you are connected to is trustworthy there are ways and means of being hacked. Freely available software can be used to listen into the traffic between you and the network these sniffers or network analysis tools can be used to investigate your traffic down to packet level. This means unless you are using encryption your traffic can be easily listened to social networks first of all always be careful on how much information you post and share on social media.
If you post details of your regular routine online these details can be used to engineer hacks, so that they are more personalized and therefore more effective. For example if we know that you are expecting a parcel or package from a particular courier, we can engineer an email using this information which suggests it is from the courier the more information we have the more likely you are to click a link in the email which we can then use.
An alternative approach is to track your regular activity and movements if you post these online these can then be used to identify when the activities change, for instance you may be on holiday with this information we can construct an attack which creates a sense of urgency for something you cannot now respond to. Again we send an email telling you a parcel is being delivered to your home, we know you are not there and offer an alternate delivery address, as you are not at home you may be more likely to respond to this.
Keep your computer up to date make sure that you keep your computer patched and up to date often the patches issued for windows and other operating systems are to fix security breaches that have been found recently. This also applies to applications like office pdfs and java if you use these.
