There's no foolproof way to thwart every digital attack, but taking a few smart steps will make it much less likely that you'll suffer a major security breach.
A participant stands near a screen during the ethical hacking contest Insomni'hack 2014 on March 21, 2014 in Geneva. Nearly 300 hackers from all Europe gathered to measure and improve their talent at the 7th edition of the Swiss security conference and ethical hacking contest Insomni'hack organized by SCRT a Swiss company specialized in computer security.
Every year, thousands upon thousands off people have their various online accounts compromised by hackers. Whether through targeted phishing attacks or database hacks that leak millions of usernames and passwords out onto the web, there's no reason to suspect that this danger will end anytime soon.
Luckily there are some steps you can take to ensure you aren't the easiest target out there.
- Keep your accounts separated
Make sure all your accounts aren't daisy-chained together. A good start is keeping Twitter and Facebook unlinked. It's also a good idea to use different email addresses for logins to those sites and other popular ones. Having everything tied to a single Gmail account can lead to disaster if that email gets hacked. Be sure to look through the various apps and extentions that have access to your account as well. Hacks that exploit these relationships can let hackers into your account without ever having to know your password.
2 Use a strong, unique password
A randomly generated combination of letters, symbols, and numbers is best; at the very least, use some combination that has both letters and numbers and steer clear of common phrases. Yes, it's a pain to create and remember unique passwords. The best way to make it managable is to use a well-respected password manager like Lastpass. Just make sure you secure that account with a good password you won't forget
3 Turn on two-factor authentication
Two-factor authentication makes it so you need both a password and a code, typically sent to your phone over text, to get into your account.Take Gmail: After you type in your password, you'll be prompted for a code, which Gmail will either send to your phone or display via a mobile app, depending on your preferences. With two-factor set up, stealing your password isn't enough to access your account. The attacker would need to get your phone, too.
Here are the setup pages for some of the most important sites on which to enable two-step authentication: Twitter, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Microsoft. You can find others here.
Beyond changing how you access your accounts, there are also more general changes you can make to make your digital life more secure.
4 Install the browser extension 'HTTPS Everywhere'
Available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, HTTPS Everywhere gives you the encrypted version of a site whenever it's available. The extension, which comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project, makes it easier to automatically access a site's secure https version (the S stands for "secure") rather than the regular http version, which is often the default. When you access an unencrypted site, you get the site's data directly, and any data you send to the site goes back directly too. With https, data moving in either direction are encrypted, making it tougher for hackers to grab information as it's transmitted.
5 Keep your browsing history secret
If you're really worried about keeping your browsing history secret, go a step beyond private browsing and use Tor, which beams your internet trail around servers, obscuring your tracks
6 Use a password manager
Using a bunch of different, strong passwords and changing them often makes internet life easier for you in the long run—you're less likely to get hacked—but it's pretty burdensome in the short term, when you have to actually remember all those different passwords. Luckily, you don't really need to remember them all—you just need to remember a single, super-strong master password that unlocks a password manager. The best ones are 1Password, LastPass, and Dashlane. Expect to pay a little bit for the premium service, but it is worth it.
7 Update your computer's software and firmware
Regularly check to make sure your computer's software and firmware are up to date. Apple and Microsoft both frequently introduce security patches after widespread hacks
