Staying Safe Online: Your Behavior is Your First Line of Defense

Every day, the hackers are getting smarter and better at thwarting codes and firewalls and the scam artists are inventing more creative ways to get you to give up your personal information.

Sometimes this works out in your favor. As a marketer and entrepreneur, it is in your best interest to be able to monitor everything every visitor does while he or she is on your website. Cookies, fingerprinting, they all work to your advantage, allowing you to better tailor your offerings to your customers and site visitors.

As someone who is desperately trying to keep private information private and who is constantly worried about keeping customer information safe and secured, figuring out how to protect yourself and your business as you live and work online is a top priority. Here are some tools and tips to help you do that.

Email Protection

A lot of protecting yourself as you move around online is plain old common sense. According to the Washington Post, most hacking takes place via your email system. You click a link, open an attachment, choose to view something in rich HTML instead of plain text, etc. and boom. Suddenly your system crashes or, worse, something quietly slips in to your system and starts collecting and sending your data to a third party.

Making sure that you know how to protect and screen your email is important. Never click links in your email inbox unless you are positive you can trust the source and the sender. Even then, type the link’s url into your browser instead of clicking, just in case. Set up scanners so that email from certain senders gets deleted and so that attachments are scanned before winding up in your inbox.

Increase Your Security

Every operating system, even the Apple’s, is vulnerable to attack. The Android OS, in particular, seems to be a favorite target of hackers. This is likely because Android is an open source, which means that anybody can get a look at the code and play around with it. 

Google, Samsung, and Amazon are all working around the clock to patch the holes as people find them but sometimes things still get through. Android users are also more vulnerable to attacks because they can download apps from anywhere; the apps don’t have to be approved by a central committee, the way they do on Apple devices.

One of the best ways to make sure that your systems stay safe is to tailor your security software to the operating system you are using. One-size-fits all won’t do very much because, ironically, it is trying to do too much. If you are an Android user, for example, installing an antivirus for Android software will better protect you than a general program.

Password Protection

Remember when passwords could be simple? Now you need to include upper and lower case letters, numbers, special symbols, emojis…well, okay, emojis aren’t actually required (yet) but sometimes it feels like they may as well be. It has also been proven that the longer your password the harder it is for hackers to crack. Passphrases are better than passwords. And, of course, every password has to be radically different than every other password you have and you have to change them all every few weeks.

Most people totally ignore those last two rules, choosing to have only a couple of default passwords and changing them only when news breaks of a site they use regularly being hacked. A better way to manage passwords is to follow the rules, use long and unique passphrases and then manage them with a secured password manager. This way you don’t have to remember them all of the time. You need remember only your manager’s password.

Securing at the Server Level

As an entrepreneur, you want your sites to be hosted on sites that have the highest possible level of server side protections and security.  You don’t want your customers to be at risk because you’re trying to save a couple of bucks on an unsecured shared server. Spend the money to protect your clients!

These are all things that you can do to protect yourself. Do them to protect your business as well! Your clients will thank you for it.