Online security has been in the news a lot lately, and guess what? It’s going to be a lot more. The data security domain will be one of the biggest growth industries for the foreseeable future. Of course it is right? Everything we do is online now. From banking, buying, and browsing to liking, tweeting, and sharing we spend more time sending bits over the internet than ever before.
Because of that being safe online has become an important fact of most of our lives and I’d like to recommend a few tips on how to do that. The first thing I’d recommend is beefing up your passwords. You know what the most common passwords of 2013 were?
123456, password, 12345678, qwerty, and abc123.
Seriously, that’s ridiculous and if you’re using any of those or your pets name or favorite color I highly recommend using Lastpass. It is a password manager that is awesome at helping you make it tough on would be invaders. The best part about it is that it’s free tier is perfect for most but for more features they offer a great paid subscription.
Another deterrent is using two-step verification for your email and social media. It does exactly what you would think it does and makes you take two steps to access your accounts. Many services offer two-step verification including Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, and more. It’s a little more work on your end but well worth the extra layer of security.
Both of these are great ways to keep people from accessing your personal data but in actuality we are not in control of securing all of our information. Companies like Target, Home Depot, Dropbox, Google, Apple and others hold the keys to some of our most private data. So when it comes down to it the best way to stay in control is to stay off the webs. So if you take personal pictures or have extremely important documents do it the old fashioned way and you’ll be safer for it.
