How to Reduce the Risk of Your Online Accounts Being Hacked

Internet security and protecting your online identity is becoming one of the major threats of the current day. With the increase in social media and access to personal data being more available, we must be more vigilant and careful what we are posting out on to the web. It is important to limit who can view certain data about ourselves on social media platforms. We may want our friends and family to view all of our details on social media platforms however; it is important that we are careful of who is actually viewing this personal information.

There are some simple steps that can be taken to reduce the risk of your data being hacked. Remember these steps will reduce the opportunity for hackers but cannot guarantee your accounts will not be hacked.

It is important that you have strong passwords. That does not mean using your pet's name; your favorite football team or your high school name and many other similar answers to these types of questions do not count as a strong password. If asked this for security questions do not provide real answers as these can be easily figured out. I know it can be a pain to change your passwords often and then you often find yourself having to reset them as you keep forgetting them. It is better to spend a few extra minutes generating passwords on a regular basis then spending hours trying to resolve the issues of your account being hacked. The stronger passwords contain both upper and lower case letters and special characters. Passwords should not be actual words, as this is more difficult to detect for hackers. Do not use the same password for different sites. It can be difficult to remember all these different password combinations however; there are many tools that you can use to store these passwords. One used by many currently is RoboForm. You will have to create one master password that will allow you to access your all saved passwords. There are great tools to simplify your password management.

With the increase in use of social media it is important to update your privacy settings on a regular basis. Only share your contact information with people you know and keep your social media profiles private as can be. Simply displaying an email address, screen names, phone numbers and other contact information can become an advantage for a hacker.

By implementing the changes to your online details you will be at less risk of your data and information being accessed. Even if you do regularly update passwords, create strong passwords and follow the advice above there is still a chance of your information being accessed, but there is less of a chance than if you do not do follow this.