Many people and businesses who become victims of cyber-attacks are not prepared for the loss of data and personal information that can occur. We often hear of hacking scandals of large corporations in the media, but anyone on the internet can be vulnerable to an attack. Here are some of the easiest and best ways you can ensure that your data is secure.
Cyber-attacks on corporations and smaller businesses could leave your data vulnerable
While you can put things in place to reduce the chance of your data going missing unfortunately if businesses aren’t secure then no matter what you do, there’s still a chance they could lose your data to third party hackers/scammers. If this does happen, then you’ll be able to look into data protection compensation as your information has been leaked to third party hackers/scammers and it’s not your fault.
Secure your devices
Ensure that your devices are secure as they can possibly be by looking into encryption when emailing. Encryption is something that is available to everyone today. It’s a safety feature that can be simple to take advantage of. There are several plug-ins and other options available and many of them are free. For example, GPG is a free plug-in for Apple Mail that enables users to verify, encrypt and decrypt emails.
Strong passwords are key
You want to ensure that you’re not using the same password all the time! Try and make sure that your password is completely unique with uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters. In order to make passwords harder to detect you could use a phrase or slogan that you are likely to remember and use only the first letters or some of them. Another option is to use Google Chrome password manager, which generates a unique and safe password for websites and then stores encrypted versions. When you sign in, Google will use this encrypted version to log you into the website without making you vulnerable to hackers. Of course, none of these options are 100% safe, but there are ways to protect your data with stronger password combinations.
Update your phone
You need to ensure that you’re updating your phone with software updates regularly. Companies will constantly install updates to reduce the chance of any vulnerabilities that could potentially be there on older versions so make sure you update!
Install antivirus and malware software
There’s a lot of options out there but these are almost a necessity as they can reduce the chance of any malware accessing your computers data.
Back up data
Backing up your data is key. Especially if something did go wrong, or if it’s lost or stolen you will still have a copy of everything.
There are many different steps you can take to keep your data safe, but the ones mentioned here are some of the most basic and important steps that can prevent hackers from entering your system.
