Top Cybersecurity Tips to Keep You Safe While Internet Surfing

The Internet is riddled with threats, but we are at the stage where we can’t imagine our lives without it. And how inefficient it will be! Actually, you don’t need to. It’s not the Internet that the problem – it’s the negligence with which we treat our personal data. We are not going to ponder on the reasons for such a phenomenon, because it’s a whole another story. Instead, let’s take a quick look at the possible dangers and how to avoid them with three cybersecurity tips.

Main Threats and Their Repercussions

Cybersecurity awareness is aimed mostly at educating humans and thus eliminating potential threats. With the advance of information protecting software, it became apparent that the main cause was not the imperfect antivirus or firewall, but carefree humans.To put it ironically, in one corner we have all the modern security methods, encryption, firewalls, etc., and in the other, we have a user. Every year this negligence results in millions of accounts lost, leading to reputational and financial damage of unprecedented scale. Not to mention psychological damage a person can sustain due to leaked personal conversations or photos.Here are a few simple, yet very effective tips that will put you in one team with the cybersecurity specialists, not against them.

How to Protect Your Data – Three Steps

Use Strong Passwords

We bet you’ve heard this one a million times, yet we believe repeating it is necessary until it becomes something as automatic in our minds as “Please” and “Thank you.” Okay, we are all guilty of setting “querty” or “12345678” as a password at last once especially if it happened at the dawn of the Internet era. But it’s becoming more and more dangerous, so we should start caring about our passwords as much as we do about our credit card info and car keys.Here’s what to do to start killing at the password game right now:

1. Choose passwords or passphrases from completely unrelated areas. Say, you are from London, and you are 26 years old. London26 is a bad password, even if you reshuffle letters in it and add capitalization randomly. Why? The data needed to guess the password is easily obtainable on social media.
2. Forget about long complicated words as passwords and opt for phrases instead. While it may seem like a logical solution, choosing an uncommon and long word for a password can actually do more harm than good. It’s hard to remember, so you will either note it somewhere, compromising your privacy even further, or forget it every time. Passphrases are far more effective and easy to remember. You can even come up with something funny to brighten your day.
3. Use password managers or secure spreadsheet to keep all your passwords. As we are becoming more webbed, remembering dozens of passwords turns into a tedious task. Luckily, there are ways to make this easier. You can either create a secure Google spreadsheet with a password and all where to store all your other passwords. If you don’t trust Google, there are a lot of other services happy to take care of your secret codes. Pick the trustworthy one and store all the access data there.

Update Your Device and Operations System Regularly

Yeah, those software updates are actually useful and exist no to just annoy you by interrupting a crucially important activity. Regularly updating your operating system, drivers and apps is another component in the cybersecurity recipe.The longer an OS version exists, the more time hackers have to find its vulnerabilities and exploit them. Hence, if you keep your software nice and fresh, it’s harder for the bad guys to get into your device.To stay secure, check your update settings and preferences, and make sure they are set to automatic unless you are truly passionate about a platform or device and follow their updates anyway.

Be Careful on Public Networks

There’s no escape from public networks, and why would you try to avoid them, if it’s nearly the utopic dream of free Internet for everyone come true? Well, there’s actually a good reason for trying to avoid them – or, at least, use with caution. This reason is hackers and snoopers that are trying to spy on your data, as public networks are rarely (almost never) protected and encrypted.Plus, they grant the perfect anonymity, as you don’t need to show your ID or driver’s license to use Wi-Fi in a café or an airport. Add the fact that many phones will automatically reconnect to a network they once used when it comes in a range of reach, and you have a perfect concoction for an account fraud or data stealing.To protect yourself from these horrible events, all you need to do is to download a one security app – VeePN. VeePN is a world-class VPN with military-level security, easy-to-use clients for every platform out there, and a custom encryption protocol that helps to overcome the strongest content blocks. A VPN is a technology of online communication that creates a secure tunnel between you one of the VPN’s servers, thus making you protected at all times.Even if someone tries to track your actions, VeePN’s server is as far as they can go. And finding out one of the VeePN’s IPs will give them nothing – there are thousands of similar addresses with millions of users.

Conclusion

The Internet is great, but, like all great things, it is also complicated, and can be used the wrong way. By following these simple, yet effective recommendations, you can protect yourself and your loved ones from all the dangers that lurk in the dark corners of the online realm. Start living your digital lives now according to this simple advice, and you will save yourself a lot of nerves, time and money. The best protection is prevention, right?Image courtesy of Pexels