You should know that Internet identity theft is quite real. It’s becoming more common and many innocent folks are becoming poor victims. Cyber criminals are creative and skilled in tricking others into leaking various information. Internet theft could cause financial hardships and in some cases, people could lose their jobs. When something unexpected happens, your happy life could be turned upside down. Here are things that may cause you to become vulnerable to identify theft:
- Log into social media without checking URL first: Social media phishing is a common thing that you may find. It is easy to criminals to copy the website of popular social media and put the main and log in pages to their fake website. Before logging in, make sure that the URL reads Facebook.com or Twitter.com. When you log into a fake social media site, you will remain in the login page, but your details have been recorded by the criminals. These bad people will use your login information immediately to access social media, potential causing bad things, such as sending spam messages to your buddy list and doing various scams.
- Trusting free Wi-Fi too much: Don’t trust free Internet access in bookstore, mall, school or Starbucks. It is incredibly risky to send sensitive personal and financial information through free Wi-Fi access. A bad individual could have direct access to the data stream and find potential information, when someone is logging into an account. Use free Internet access only to go to places that don’t require log in information, such as Wikipedia and YouTube. Make sure that you remain anonymous and never log into anything when you are using free Wi-Fi connection.
- Disabling Windows Updates: It is a common fact that Windows operating system isn’t fully secure. It means the numerous updates are needed. It means that you always get pop-up messages to remind you about the availability of recent updates. This will ruin your overall experience ad may interrupt your fun, when you are playing online games or watching movies with your laptop. That’s the reason why people stop these notifications, so they can use their computers more easily. However, Windows updates are often meant to patch security holes related to wireless networks. When an update has been released, it also means that the hole has become a public knowledge and hackers will try to exploit that. They are counting to the fact that not all Windows users are installing the security updates. During your spare time, you could update all patches and you can just do anything else while Windows is being patched, such as doing the dishes or watching TV. When you are in doubt, you should contact the local tech and you should never disable Windows Update.
- Using very simple password: In some situations, you urgently need to access your email to get important attachments. It means that you need to choose a complex password that only you can remember fairly easily. You may start with a word that’s uniquely familiar to you and modify it with numbers, uppercase letters, lowercase letters and allowed symbols.