How to stay safe Online
João is truly passionate about CyberSecurity! With a degree in…
It’s hard to imagine a world without technology, without waking up and looking at your phone, turning on the TV every day or almost every day, without using a computer for nearly everything, without reading or consulting news using a tablet or any other screen of our choice… With the key role that technology plays in our lives today, it becomes crucial to stay safe online, and there is nothing better than being informed and taking action to protect ourselves in our daily lives.
Nowadays there are several software that allow us to analyze and influence people’s psychological activity through navigation habits – Digital Footprint. It is easy to notice this by the way we often receive personalized ads, recommended videos or even search and share suggestions. But there is more of what these software can do. With the collected data and all the information, we publish freely, we are easily mapped and identified (OSINT). If these concepts are new to you, I invite you to refer to my last article, “Security Begins at Home” where I explored the concepts of “Digital Footprint” and “OSINT Framework”.
In addition to the tips and suggestions that I shared in that first article and in a perspective to further strengthen the topic of online security I intend to explore some of the main scenarios and contexts where we may be more susceptible, and help you decrease your chances of being the target of a cyber-attack.
Social Media is by far the largest source of data that we donate for free to any user in the world.
To avoid the easy mapping of our personal information, we must make small changes to our habits that will have a strong expression in our online security. Here are some:
- Avoid exposing personal data such as our email, name, address, workplace, important dates or even the names of our pets!
- Filter the content we share, such as locations, likes, comments, media shares, etc.
- Pay attention to the credibility and authenticity of the sites we visit.
- Use only our equipment to access our accounts on the different platforms.
- Always write our search and do not accept or click on recommended content.
- Use exclusive e-mails and passwords on every website! If you’d prefer not to have exclusive passwords, you can divide them into sectors, for example, having an exclusive email for work, an exclusive e-mail for social networks, an exclusive e-mail for personal use. Then we can use an extension of that e-mail to direct and filter it in our inbox. For example: in the original e-mail ”user.work @***.##” used for work-related content, we can use the ”+” symbol to add a new address to our e-mail, such as ”user.work+affinity@***.##” or ”user. work+other@*** .##”. Both e-mails will arrive in the original e-mail box, ”user.work@***.##”.
- Finally, don’t forget to use strong passwords. Check out my last article “Security Begins at Home” for some useful tips related to strong passwords.
It is impossible to be 100% safe in the technological context we live in, but it is definitely feasible – and necessary – to increase our security as well as protect the safety of the people close to us by making small adjustments in our everyday online behavior and complying with these simple key rules.
Sometimes we are not the main target of a possible attack, but we can avoid being the loose end of the map to the real target.
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João is truly passionate about CyberSecurity! With a degree in computing and cloud computing, João loves evolution and innovation, learning and helping others. He considers himself a life-hacker for facing everything with curiosity, trying to evolve in a self-taught way, opening paths and going beyond traditional knowledge!