Even if you’ve never had your credit card number stolen, you’ve probably heard the horror stories outlining massive devastation that can happen to families when someone falls victim to identity theft. Identity theft protection is increasingly important as hackers develop ever-more sophisticated methods for stealing personal information online.
With so many avenues for thieves to steal your identity—credit cards, discarded financial statements, social networks, hacking your online financial accounts and more—how do you even being to implement an identity theft protection plan? While there are no guarantees, there are some steps you can take to reduce the likelihood that you’ll be the next identity theft victim.
[Read also: 4 Scary Ways Your Personal Information Is Being Used]
1. Be Mindful of Phishing Attempts
Phishing attempts are extremely common. If you get an email from a financial vendor asking you to click a link and login to their system to change your password or for some other purpose, don’t do it. Always type the URL for your accounts directly into your browser’s address bar. Clicking on links sent via email could be directing you to a faux site, designed solely to trick you into revealing your login credentials.
2. Less is More When It Comes to Social Media
You may be all over the social networking craze, whether for business or pleasure. It’s tough to avoid social media today, especially if you use it for business purposes. But be mindful of how much information you reveal about yourself. Information that’s publicly available on your social profiles can be used to answer security questions or guess passwords to other websites.
[Read also: LinkedIn Hacked – How Safe are Social Networking Sites?]
3. Use Strong Passwords and Good Password Practices
Because information that can be easily discovered about you online can be used to guess your passwords, you should avoid using this type of information to generate passwords. Things like combinations of your children’s or pets’ names, your year of birth and other easily-guessed data should be avoided.
The more random your password, and the more complex it is (both uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters), the tougher it is to crack. You should also make a point to change your passwords frequently, at least every 30 days. Finally, avoid using the same password for multiple websites. A hacker who cracks a single password can suddenly have access to all your accounts if you don’t use unique passwords.
[Read more: 6 Steps in Making A Safe and Strong Internet Password]
4. Secure Your Wireless Network and Use Public Wi-Fi with Caution
Wi-Fi is incredibly convenient for accessing the Internet on the go, but it also adds complexity to identity theft protection. Information you send across an unsecured network can be intercepted by hackers, so accessing your financial accounts and other sensitive information via public Wi-Fi is pretty much putting it out there for anyone to view. Sometimes working on a public network is unavoidable, but try to send your sensitive data from a secure connection when possible.
5. Use Anti-Virus Software and Maximize Browser Security Settings
Anti-virus and anti-spyware software will help prevent malicious programs from gaining access to your computer. These programs can not only harm the functionality of your device, but they may contain key-loggers which can track your keystrokes to obtain login credentials for sensitive data. Use your browser security settings to control factors such as cookies. Cookies track your online activity for various purposes, including advertising. Some, however, may be malicious and can serve as a vehicle for identity theft. Limiting cookie permissions and using in-private or anonymous browsing adds a layer of identity theft protection.
6. Carefully Check All Financial Statements
Whether you get bank statements, credit card statements or investment earnings statements, you should evaluate each carefully to detect any unusual activity or changes. If your credit card number is stolen, for instance, catching it early will let you stop thieves in their tracks before they rack up tens of thousands of dollars in charges.
You should also order and check your credit reports regularly. That’s because identity thieves could open new accounts using your name and identity. If you’re not getting these statements in the mail, the only way to detect it is by noticing a strange account on your credit report or a sudden change in your credit score.
Identity theft protection is a multi-faceted process, but it’s not overly complex. Following some simple, yet sound Internet practices, using good password habits and keeping a careful eye on your financial statements will help you maintain control over your identity.
[Read also: Holiday Internet Safety Tips to Avoid Online Identity Theft]
Very important tips Peter, any tips on how to secure wireless wifi, besides its normal encryption key?
That’s easy, don’t use wifi! LOL just kidding! That’s a topic for another article, Nhick. Stay tuned! 🙂
One must be aware of the fact that your trash could be the treasure for identity thieves. So to prevent identity theft, shred your receipts, credit card offers, bank statements, returned checks and any other sensitive information before throwing it away. Otherwise there is always a chance for your identity theft. Thanks for sharing the post katelyn..
That’s why I insist in e-statements and try to avoid hard copy statements.
My neighbors always try to use my Wifi, so i put in a really good password, now those guys cant slow down my internet 🙂
Assigning a password for your WiFi is the basic thing to do for all WiFi owners! Not only to avoid slow internet connection if there are people trying to use your WiFi but to prevent the possibility of hackers accessing your sensitive data as well.
Along with the convenience of modern technology is the risk also of being tricked. We should be responsible of our every action over the internet especially those involving our financial statements.
WE MUST check the URL field on address bar before entering passwords ever to be safe from Phising. Also having strong passwords leads a good security favor. We must should not keep default passwords or auto-generated passwords. There are also some tools on web for generating highly secure passwords that will take Billions of years for a PC to crack with a brute force attack!
Thanks for the comment, Jafar! Hope to see you around!
Great tips pete.One should follow all these tps while using passwords.Try to build a strong password.scan your computer using some best antiviruses like ESET Nod.Thanks again howdy for sharing these valuable tips!
Great article but one little point on the password security tip. The accepted best practice for creating passwords has always been to use an alphanumeric password, with some additional characters like !, # or ? included in it for added variation.
There’s a new wave of thought that multiple word passwords might actually be more effective. So instead of using: ?pa55word! you could use something like: thestrongestpasswordknowntoman.
Apparently the number of iterations a brute force hack would need to use to crack this is far higher than with alphanumeric passwords alone?