Ways to Protect My Online Identity

 

Ways in which you can protect your identity

 

In the times of today, we are more online than offline, and in large parts too as it provides us the facility to take advantage of the online features such as paying our electricity bills and making appointments. But these different advantages also make us exposed to the online risks, such as the identity theft.

Identity theft signifies that one person is using another person's personal and financial data for their advantage. Cyber criminals steal your information like your name or birthday, the Social Security number, your driver’s license, address, and details of your bank account and use it to take benefit from it. A name and along with that a matching financial information is going to be such a risk, and they might use it for applying to the credit cards and for the opening of new accounts.

 

Get your devices Password protected and use strong passwords

It is a good habit to get your computer, tablet, and mobile phones password protected by making use of quite strong passwords. The computer and mobile devices can be a target to most of your sensitive information, which includes your emails and different apps that are connected to your bank accounts. So, if such devices get into the hands of a hacker, it is only a password that will make it harder for accessing your personal data.

Do not forget to make use of different passwords for all your social media accounts. If you are using the same password for the accounts, and a criminal may gain access to one of your accounts, and then access to all others. However, McAfee’s protection service for identity comes with a password manager, that will help you in securing your account details on different devices. 

 

Get educated about the identity theft and ave yourself from phishing scams

Identity thieves are quite skilled at attacking new technologies. One of the great examples of this is Phishing. Phishing includes criminals that are attacking as trustworthy sites, like the agencies of the government and the banks, and make use of this trusted place to fetch sensitive information from you. They take place via phone, messages, and mail.

 

Make use of alerts from your bank

When there is a theft of finance, there can be an impact on financial places such as the banks and the lenders. So, a fraud can take place. To overcome this, you can use the fraud alerts. You can have your online banking set up with fraud alerts in your email, message, or call. On doing this, if your bank finds a suspicious activity, they can send you alerts immediately.

Read: https://www.allantivirussupport.com/blog/what-are-the-highest-cyber-threats-in-the-year-2021/

 

Be very conscious of what you are sharing on the social media

Social media is a great way to connect with people online, but it also opens the door to some cyber threats. You need to be quite careful about what you are posting, and you must stop yourself from a clear sharing of personal information such as your home address, family members names, pet’s images, or your and others' birthdays, which most of the people use as their app passwords. If you see the option of two factor authentication password for your social media, you need to use it in.

Images are another delicate subject. You should not post pictures that displays your private data, such as the photo of your passport or of your vaccine or voted card. You need to check thoroughly of what is present in the background of your photos — that can be your home (containing of the house number) or also your address. Lastly, you may change your visibility to private on all your social media sites, and limit it to a selected few who can view them. even if your account is done privately, you must still follow the tips given above.

 

Shredding of sensitive data and information

Some identity thefts will lead to getting people’s private and confidential information via the dumpster diving. What is the solution for it? We suggest you to get hold of a paper shredder. This will help you with the shredding of documents into little pieces that can not be put into pieces together again, and it will make it difficult for someone else to piece them back together and any personal data that they contain.

 

We will suggest you to keep the documents given below to be shredded:

• Statements of your debit card, credit card, and all the bank statements that have all your personal and financial information
• receipts and Invoices that contains details about your financial account number
• Documents that contain your Social Security number, such as the pay stubs and contracts from work 
• Junk mail that has got your contact information, such as your name, email address and address
• Old pictures and old IDs, that people can use or create fake IDs
• Shipping and delivery labels, such as those you might find from online hopping sites and retails for making product returns
• Medical receipts or records, that has your insurance information
• Canceled cheques
• If you are not sure about something that you need that must be shredded, then we will suggest you to destroy it. It only takes a few minutes, and it is better to do so.

 

Secure all your devices with the help of an antivirus software

You might be a computer user, or you may use a tablet, or a mobile device when you are doing any of the online activities, such as playing games or paying the bills. These devices have in them a lot of confidential data. So, it is suggested to protect them from the hackers. All you need to do is install the popular antivirus software such as the McAfee and it will do the job of protecting you and your data from viruses, malware and spyware. It would be the best if you also install a firewall, it is a network security system and will help in controlling the network traffic from incoming and outgoing as per the security standards that you have set.

 You may also like:  https://www.allantivirussupport.com/blog/a-cybersecurity-that-is-ai-driven-working-smartly-and-not-hard/