Protect yourself from cyber crime

Were you affected by yesterday’s news that eBay had been hacked? The online auction site urged all of its members to change their passwords (so if you haven’t already, do it now), saying that hackers had gained access to information like email addresses, home addresses, birth dates and passwords. Even if you only ever use the website rarely, it is important that you change your password.

This is not the first serious security breach at a large company – in fact there have been a string of them recently, with the Heartbleed bug infecting users all over Gmail and Facebook, and US firm Target suffering theft of credit card information on an enormous scale just a few months ago.

With the world operating almost entirely digitally these days, it pays to be as secure as you can with your own data. Here are some tips for making sure you’re being as cyber secure as you can possibly be.

1)   Try to make all your passwords different. Have one for your bank account, a different one for Facebook, a different one still for your email, etc. One of the reasons security breaches like the ones at eBay are potentially so bad is that for anyone who only uses one password for everything, once cyber criminals have that one password, they can gain access to all of your accounts.

2)   Make your passwords difficult to guess. If someone knows your date of birthday, the names of your grandchildren, or your pet dog, they can guess your password. Make it something more difficult to guess.

3)   Equally, it helps if your passwords are easy enough for you to remember, so that you don’t have to write them all down. If you do need some sort of reminder, write questions that will point you in the direction of the password, rather than the password itself.

4)   Try and use a mix of numbers and letters, without resorting to simple combinations (like 1234, 0000, etc).

5)   Always use two-step verification where possible. This might involve answering a personal question, and you can often choose which question you want asked, so you can make it as obscure as you like – and the obscurer the better!

6)   Using the first letters of a phrase that means something to you can be a good password, as long as it’s not too obvious a phrase. For example, if the Wizard of Oz song Somewhere Over the Rainbow was a favourite of yours, you could have “sotrwuh” as one of your passwords, preferably with some numbers thrown in for good measure!

7)   Jumble it up. Try and use a combination of the above methods to come up with some obscure passwords that you can remember – mix and match phrases, numbers, even use random punctuation and spelling mistakes to keep them varied.

Have you ever had an account hacked? What steps do you take to keep as cyber secure as possible? Does the proliferation of cyber crime worry you? Let us know in the comments below…