Five Quick Tips for Individual Cyber Safety

It’s a wild, wild cyber world out there, with lots of bad people trying to access your sensitive data and any personal information they can find. They intend to damage you and your family.  How can you protect yourself?

5 Tips for Individual Cyber Safety

Here are five quick tips that can make you a little safer and more protected:

1. Think before you click. If an email seems to have deadlines, urgency, or just doesn’t feel right, don’t click the link until you do some research.  Reach out directly to the company before you click.  Hover over the hyperlink in the e-mail and see where it is going to send you next.  Quick clicking can be how a scammer is able to access your personal information.  If in doubt, throw it out!
2. Use 2FA every day. Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds a second layer of protection to an account. This is done by an email or text from the website sent to you before access is gained to your account.  Is it a pain? Yes, but in the long run, it can make a difference in preventing a scammer from gaining access to an important account.  Check with the company or look in settings on the website to see if you can implement two-factor authentication on your account.
3. Don’t Repeat, Repeat. We get it, it’s easier to remember one password, so we use that same password everywhere! However, the risk of an attacker finding that password and trying it on multiple websites can leave you at great risk for a cyber incident.  Use a password manager like Roboform, LastPass, or Google Password Manager to help you manage multiple passwords for sites you use.
4. Be Strong. Strong passwords matter.  Many of the password managers mentioned above will generate random passwords for you, save them, and populate the login fields for websites.  Your dog, birthday, your oldest child, and your birthdate can all be found on social media and can be easily hacked by a determined scammer.  And please, don’t make your password “password”!
5. Security Guard. Install security software on your devices from a reliable source and maintain updates. It can be a great guard against spam or pop-ups.

Greg McMurry is the Chief Operating Office with Rather & Kittrell.