How to Prevent Hackers from Accessing your Online Accounts in 2018

As the world advances in technology, hackers device special means of stealing information, money and other valuables online. In recent time, we saw a case on Facebook where a cryptocurrency investor was lamenting about how his investment worth $7000 was hacked and his wallet emptied.

There is need to protect yourself and your investments online to avoid ending up hacked. Last year, we talked about password patterns to avoid in the year 2017, and also cybersecurity and how to be safe online. In this post, we would be looking at the various ways of avoiding been hacked this year 2018. This was brought about by the endless emails we receive and cases we see daily on Facebook.

These ways were born out of research and gatherings from experts all over the world. It promises to be invaluable and simple.

Below are some tips to help prevent hackers from accessing your online account:

• Do not use the same password you used for your emails on your other online accounts
• Activate two-factor authentication (2FA) on all your emails and web accounts.
• Do not download anything you see on the internet
• Do not share your PC with anyone including your relations
• Try as much as possible to check URLs before entering any of your account details online to avoid phishing.

Do not use the same password you used for your emails on your other online accounts: some people make use of the same password on all or almost all their online account which is a bad practice. This is because, as soon as a hacker gets access to one of your online accounts, he can as well get access to others with ease.

Also, there are password managers used as extensions on most modern browsers like Chrome that you can leverage on. These password managers generate random and very difficult to crack passwords and save them for you. By so doing, no one can guess your password. It is also important that you make use of premium password managers if you can.

Activate the 2FA on all your emails and web accounts: as it sounds, two-factor authentication is one of the features that so many online sites are combining now on their sites to reduce the risk of hackers penetrating a user’s account. It is a way of combining both passwords (something you know and can as well be known by someone else) with your mobile device (something you have that no one has).

There are so many ways of mobile device verifications available. In some, a random sequence of numbers will be sent as an SMS to your mobile device and you will be required to enter the sent numbers before anyone can be granted access to your account. In others, you might have to grant access to the account using an android or IOS app, while others make use of key fobs, some need you to upload some file that is unique to you, etc.

This is a very good security feature that is available on most popular websites but they are not automatically turned on or are not turned on by default. You will have to activate it on your account before it starts functioning. All you need to do is to go to your account settings and search for the option of turning on 2FA and voila! It is up and running on your account.

Do not download everything you see on the internet: over the years, malware has been distributed all over the internet and according to FORBES, about 300,000 websites are affected by malware every single day. Because of this, download every email attachment, downloading files from everywhere on the internet, links in emails, visiting wrong websites exposes you to the risk of downloading ransomware, keyloggers, or malicious codes that are capable of stealing or monitoring anything you do on your device.

To avoid this, do not click on links that are sent to you through the mail, or at least verify with the sender to make sure it is correct and safe, do not download things from websites that you do not trust.

Do not share your PC with anyone including your relations: to avoid being at risk, it is advised that you do not share your PC with anyone – at least, not the one you use for online businesses. This is because; you cannot trust anyone and you would not know what they will be doing on the internet with your device while you are away.

They could download malware, keyloggers from the internet to your system or could also compromise your system and get your online accounts tampered with.

Try as much as possible to check URLs before entering any of your account details online to avoid phishing: to know more about phishing, you can refer to this article. Phishing is actually a way through which hackers can get your login details by creating a website that is similar to another website and redirects you to it.

When you enter your login details on the cloned website, your login details are either sent to the hacker’s email or is stored in his database. He then has access to your account and can do anything he wants with it. This type of trick is usually used for getting valid Facebook logins by several hackers. They then sell these logins and use them to grow their Facebook pages and groups.

To avoid this, it is advised that you look at the URL of any site you are about to enter your login details before entering these details. By so doing, you will know if the site’s URL is the same with that of the original site.

With these, I bet you will remain safe online for this year. We would like to hear from you. Did you benefit anything from the article? Let us know. Have you experienced or suffered from any kind of hack? Let us know the prank used on you so as to help others watch out for it and stay away.