Protecting Yourself Online

This is the last week of Communicating Electronically and we were given our final assignment. This unit has taught me a lot and I feel I’ll be a lot more email savvy and know more about all the dangers that are found online that I’ve talked about in previous blogs. 

This week for our final report, we had to pick a topic and write about it.  I chose to write about protecting your online identity and I was very surprised by what I found online.

A lot of people these days have some sort of electronic device or social media account and it’s almost impossible to find someone who doesn’t, especially in the younger generations. But the thing is, most of these people probably don’t really know how to protect themselves from online hackers.

Once I started looking into this subject, I was surprised by how many different ways your information on sites could be used by hackers to get into your accounts. They could use anything from your address, phone number, email address or even your friend connections could come into play.

 There are a lot of ways you can protect yourself from cyber hackers, and I’m going to go through just a few.

1.       Check your privacy settings on social media sites

When you have a social media account, you should always make sure your privacy setting are set to ‘friends only.’ This way, only the people you’ve added and trust, can see anything your posts.  If you don’t have it set to ‘friends only,’ anyone can go into your profile look at what you’ve got on there.  On Facebook, there is a timeline of every post or ‘check in’ you’ve made, and stalkers and thieves could learn your patterns just by looking at them, so make sure you check your privacy settings.

2.       Keep personal information off social media sites

Having addresses, date of birth, your email address, or even your phone number on these sites can present ways for someone to gain more knowledge of you. Make sure that if you have an ‘About Me’ section, you don’t put down too much information about yourself and don’t add any ‘friends’ you don’t know outside of the networking sites.

3.       Receiving emails you aren’t too sure about

Spam emails are being sent more frequently and are becoming more sophisticated with every day that passes.  If there is ever an email sent to you which you aren’t sure about, make sure you delete it and report it to your email administration immediately.  Make sure you never respond to emails which ask for your account details, even if it looks like it’s been sent by your bank.  Banks never ask you for any of your account information online or by phone, but if you are in doubt, always call your bank first.

4.       Have you got a secure password?

Protecting your password is extremely important as you should already know. Knowing this, you should protect them and keep them safe by not telling anyone what they are and making sure they’re strong passwords.  Don’t use your birth date or an easy number sequence such as 12345 because if they’re easy to remember, they’ll probably be easy to crack.  Also making sure you have a separate password for each different online account you may have will ensure that even if one account is hacked, your other accounts will be safe.

5.       Instead of using your credit card, use PayPal

When you are using your credit card online, you are risking a great deal giving out the number, especially if the site you’re on isn’t secure. When you are using a PayPal card, you are protecting your credit card number and the fewer people who know what your credit card number is, the better off you are.

We also had a look at setting up filters in Gmail and I must say, I did have a bit of trouble trying to figure out how to actually set one up and had to get a little help, but I’ve found that they’re actually quite great! You can get the filter to pick up certain words in an email and filter into a file just for those, or you can filter any messages from certain people into a file of their own also.