You don’t need to be Edward Snowden in order to have decent cyber-security. With hacks and ransomware on the rise, now is the best time to get up to to speed on what you can do to keep your data and web activity secure. Here we have a quick run-down of the simple steps everyone can implement to safeguard their systems.
Two Factor Authentication
Two-factor logins are increasingly common on the modern internet, with large organisations like Google progressively moving towards standardising them across its services. For the time being though, this login procedure is not the default and must be selected by the user in order to get the benefits.
This type of login is extremely secure, as it relies on multiple sources of information (factors) in order to verify your identity and grant you access to your services and accounts. Organisations that use strong anti-fraud measures to protect their patrons, such as gaming platform PokerStars and the American bank Wells Fargo, use a random number generator built by RSA called SecurID, which is an especially robust form of Two factor authentication.
While this technology is useful in many circumstances, for the average user seeking to access their social accounts, the biometric scanners in your smartphone are a perfect alternative. These typically include fingerprint scanners and facial recognition technology such as Apple’s FaceID. Two step authentication that uses these security measures effectively prevents anyone but you from accessing your secure logins. As you normally have your smartphone on you, this process can be very streamlined and efficient, without requiring extra effort in order to gain entry to your accounts.
Web Trackers
Browsing security has risen in popularity over the past decade, with a corresponding increase in awareness as to how large technology companies collect and sell our data to marketing firms. Website trackers and cookies follow us around the internet from site to site collecting data on us and building profiles of our activity.
There are a variety of things you can do to prevent this from happening. While we volunteer our data in exchange for access to services like Facebook, and good websites will openly feature their privacy policies, it doesn’t automatically follow that you should be tracked in all instances without consent when online. To minimise or prevent this from happening, you can use a VPN, which stands for Virtual Private Network.
This is a piece of software that creates a relay between your home IP address and the websites you’re connecting to by bouncing the connection through multiple intermediary computers placed in different locations around the globe. This has the effect of making your browsing anonymous, as it becomes impossible to trace your IP address from your activity.
In addition to this, choosing to use open source and privacy oriented software can have a big impact on your web-security. Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and the Chromium-based privacy browser Brave block adverts and trackers for you. You can also explore alternative search engines such as Qwant and DuckDuckGo that value privacy and anonymity.
Powerful Passwords
In 2020, Nord released a survey of the top 200 most commonly used passwords. The majority of these were very straightforward combinations, such as “qwerty”, “123456” and “password1”. Nord found that the vast majority of these passwords were able to be cracked by algorithm software in less than one second, making them entirely ineffectual in the face of a cyberattack.
Typically a strong password will have a mixture of upper and lower cases letters, as well as a variety of numbers and symbols. These are naturally very difficult to remember, but using a password manager is a great solution to this.
Password managers, like LastPass and Nordpass, are security encrypted vaults that store all your passwords and let you automatically input them on your frequently used websites and accounts. This has the added benefit of safeguarding your passwords from being recorded by keyloggers when using an untrustworthy computer. Having a strong password is one of the most effective steps users can take to safeguard their data.
