Are you taking steps to protect your personal and financial information? How do you safeguard? Nowadays, we will rely on computer to save our personal data and doing financial transactions such as e-banking by using computer in order to save our time. After all, if the information falls into person with bad intention, it can lead to fraud or identity theft. Therefore, do you think that safeguards that you done are sufficient enough to protect your personal and financial information?
There are some ways to safeguard our personal and financial data:
There are some ways to safeguard our personal and financial data:
1. User ID
Avoid identifying information in user IDs, such as first initial and full last name. We should use a substitute name that avoids any reference to your name, job or other personal attributes can make tracking more difficult. Besides, we shall not use the same ID across multiple services.
2. Encryption and password security
Whenever we are transmitting data over private or public networks, we should assume that somebody could be eavesdropping on the packet data that we sent and receive. Therefore, when we transmitting sensitive data, we should use some form of encryption to protect our data. Besides, we should use stronger password to protect our access data. For example, use longer password or a combination of numeric and alphabet passwords. By using encryption and password security, we can ensure that no unauthorized people can view our data if they can physically access it.
3. Install and update antivirus and antispyware programs
Make sure antivirus and antispyware programs are well installed to protect our computer against viruses and Trojan horse from stealing or modifying our data on computer. In addition, we also need to keep our virus definitions up to date. Besides, we should regularly scan our computer system for spyware because spyware may affect performance of our computer.
4. Avoid accessing financial information in public
We should not access financial information and do any financial transaction in public such as coffee shop or cyber café that offers wireless access. It is because we do not know whether there have been installed spyware in their computer and hacker can easily get our information if there is no a strong firewall.
Related Links:
http://www.msisac.org/awareness/news/2007-03.cfm
