Another safety measure you should take is to enable two-factor authentication when available. Two-factor authentication requires a user to provide an extra form of identification beyond just your login ID and password. This may be a special PIN code that’s sent to your phone, a physical token like a key fob, or your fingerprint.
Two-factor authentication isn’t impervious to attacks, but it does add an extra layer of protection. Many popular Web services, including Gmail, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook and Dropbox offer two-factor authentication, so take the extra few minutes to turn it on.
Be suspicious of emails asking for personal information. A lot of hackers use a method called “phishing” that aims to gather sensitive data from you by sending an email that looks like it’s from a legitimate entity like your bank or credit card company. Some signs of a scam might be requests for immediate action, spelling and grammar mistakes, and suspicious links. Do not respond to these. Instead, call up the institution that supposedly sent the email and confirm if it’s legit or alert them to the issue.
What to Do If You’ve Been Hacked (And How to Prevent It)
De-fense! De-fense!
There are numerous precautions that you can take in order to protect yourself from hackers. One of the easiest and most simple ways is to create strong, unique passwords for every one of your accounts. Yet most people don’t.
While it’s tempting to use something like your child’s name and birthday because it’s easier to remember, creating a password with a random mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and characters will be harder to crack.
There are password apps like LastPass and 1Password that can help you with this by generating strong passcodes for each of your accounts. Plus, they’ll keep track of them all. When choosing such a program, Iwan recommends that you look for one that uses an industry-accepted standard for encryption like Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, and one that stores your passwords locally on your computer, rather than in the cloud.