In the late 1990s, the World Wide Web was born and opened up a new world of possibilities and threats. Spam was a major cause of email disruption, computer viruses caused destruction to corporate networks, and hacking was a significant problem. Hackers could steal your personal data and take over your online or credit card account, and sell it on the dark web.
Your online experience is more complicated than ever. You’re on a smartphone, you buy online and make payments online, you’re a user of Facebook as well as your connected home appliances and IoT devices are monitoring and report on your activities. Hackers can access all of these data, regardless of whether they are part of a criminal group or a random person with a political agenda.
To protect yourself from hackers, create strong passwords for each of your online accounts and make use of a secure password manager to keep on top of your passwords. Consider using two-step authentication. This provides an additional layer of security by having you enter a code that is sent to your phone or email address in addition to your password each time you log in. Secure your hard drive to ensure that hackers are unable to access your data, even if you are able to gain control of your device or computer. Also be sure to disable ‘run as administrator’ on your PCs, don’t root or jailbreak your phones and close your computer instead of leaving it running all day long (all-time running ruins your device performance and opens the door to cyberattacks). You can minimize your risk by using appropriate software for malware scanning deinstalling, data encryption and uninstalling.
