What Are Phishing Scams?

Phishing scams can vary between each one but generally, you can think for example,  about a fake email that looks very real and official from Facebook that says you have a security issue. Please sign in to address the issue, and links you to an equally real and official-looking Facebook login page.

The big difference is that what you type in the username and password text fields gets recorded. And now you are a victim of a phishing scam as a result of phishers tricking you. To learn more about how to recognize and avoid phishing scams check out this government website that educates on it.

What Does “Incognito Mode” Mean?

The next useful means of safety is the incognito mode. This mode is offered in nearly all Internet browsers including Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Edge, Opera, and more. Some browsers may call it something else. For example, Safari calls incognito “private browsing mode.”

Incognito is a great tool that helps with quite a few things. First and foremost, it eliminates logs of your online traffic. Your browsing history will not be recorded in this mode making it impossible for hackers to see the history of what you’ve been up to.

Secondly, the lack of logs actually clears up space in your computer helping it stay less congested. This second point is not critical in online safety but is just a nice added bonus for your device’s health and for comfort in your professional life.

How to Protect Your Email and Identity Data.

In the past, the Twitter accounts of all the major tech-industry moguls, such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were all hacked.

Someone who wasn’t them signed into their accounts pretended to be them, and asked their followers to send money to an account for their money to be doubled and sent back! A pretty good deal…

Of course, it was a scam. For the outsiders, it was a funny incident, but it does highlight the need for certain security practices when navigating online.

The first thing we need to discuss is password maintenance. Don’t be that person who uses the same low-security password for every login they have. If you’re only concerned about online protection then you may want to consider a logbook of passwords physically written.

Many people will advise you against that, but ultimately your circumstances are your own and you are capable of making that choice. There are a few golden rules for healthy and safe password management:

1. Don’t Use the Same Password Twice.

This is just common sense. If one of your passwords is hacked, you don’t want all of them to be hacked.

2. Don’t Choose a Password That Could Be Easily Guessed or Cracked.

This tip might sound like preaching, but you wouldn’t believe how many people don’t stick to this basic rule. Simple words like “blue,” “cat,” “hello,” and especially the word “password,” should not be involved in any of your passwords.

Some people like to think of a sentence that encodes the chosen password. For example, “My mother made the best sandwiches when I was a kid in the 90s” might be translated into “Mmmtbswiwak90.”

As a rule of thumb, this is a good strategy, but of course, you need to keep your sentence simple enough to remember.

3. Change Your Passwords Often.

With enough computational power at hand, all hackers need to crack your password is time. If you change your passwords from time to time, they will never be able to catch up.

4. Don’t Share Your Passwords.

With ANYONE. Just that.

5. The More Complex Password the Better.

As mentioned in rule 2, complexity is better, but don’t make them so complex you cannot remember them.

6. Don’t Use Any Personal Information To Create Your Password.

Information such as birthday dates (and dates in general!) or pet names are easy to crack. This is in the same vein as rule 2 – but so many people use personal information that it needs to be its own rule.

7. Change Default Password After Setting a New Online Account.

When you first sign up for a new account, sometimes they will assign you a default password. The systems used to generate default passwords are not always safe and sometimes the default passwords can be easier to hack than a user-created password, so it is a good habit to change them to a personalized password ASAP.

8. Use 2-Factor Authentication.

9. Password Managers and 0Auth.

Of course, many the question is: if I follow rule number 1 and never repeat my passwords, and then rule number 5, namely, choose gobbledygooks only, then how am I supposed to remember all my passwords?

Well, there is a nice way around this, namely password managers. You can, in example, use Google Oath. This is a fully encrypted tool integrated with Google Chrome browser and Gmail.

Google Oath works in the following way. Once you log into your Gmail account, you automatically get access to all pages protected by passwords pegged to this Gmail account using Google Oath. You can just click the “Sign in with Google” button (0auth) and you successfully any of these passwords. 

You can put your trust in a password manager, but then you are risking your information being leaked if that password manager (Google in this case) gets hacked. 

Ultimately, two-factor authentication is currently the highest level of security, but these password managers and 0auth sign-ins make keeping track of passwords a much easier job.