The Big Question #29: How Do I Protect Myself?

Hello and welcome back to this month's edition of The Big Question. In today's world, it is nearly a guarantee that you or someone close to you has been the target of a cyberattack. Frankly, like most of us, you're probably seeing multiple attempts per week. And unlike the attempts and attacks of years past, with foreign kings wanting to send us millions of dollars, the attempts today are becoming harder and harder to distinguish, the real from the fake. Which leads us to this month's big question: how do I protect myself? And in this instance, as with many things, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you make yourself a hard target, more often than not, the criminals will come and go before you even realize that they've knocked at your door.

And while that's all good and well, the question still remains, how do we do that? How do we make ourselves a hard target? Now, fortunately, there are really a few simple but key steps, all well within your control, that you can implement immediately. First, create exceptionally strong passwords. I'm not talking about 12-to-15-character alphanumeric passwords; with AI, these passwords are getting cracked in less and less time. I'm talking about 20-plus characters, ideally generated at random. Now, understanding that this is also exceptionally difficult in its own right, generating these on your own, I would recommend utilizing a password keeper. A good password keeper allows you to autogenerate passwords of all types and lengths, with and without special characters, allowing you to better customize your passwords to adhere to each platform's requirements. This way, all you need to remember is one master password for the password keeper app, which is ideally exceptionally strong in its own right.

Secondly, back up your strong passwords with multi-factor authentication. If you have a strong password and multi-factor authentication turned on, especially on your most important online accounts, meaning anywhere sensitive information is stored and accessible, you increase the chances that you may head off the majority of these attacks before they even begin. This is because, to the majority of these criminals, this is a game of large numbers. They don't want to work too terribly hard on any one person, knowing that it's quite likely that they will run into an easier target just one or two people down the road. So make yourself a hard target on the front end, and you'll likely increase your chances of never having to worry about the cleanup and recovery on the back end.

Next, utilize virtual private networks, or VPNs. This is something that we should all be using quite regularly, or at least more often than we typically do, especially when we're in public. However, people continue to use their hotel Wi-Fi, the airport Wi-Fi, the cafe Wi-Fi, making them low-hanging fruit for these bad actors. For example, these bad actors will simply set up shop at a cafe, hang out all day, and wait for people to use the unprotected network. And once you do, they can quite easily see all that you are doing on the shared network, including, yes, you guessed it, entering your usernames and passwords.

Now, lastly, one of the simpler things that we can all do to keep our name and our credit well protected is to freeze our credit with all three credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, and simply keep it frozen. Generally, if you're not applying for credit, there's not much upside to having these unfrozen. Additionally, in today's world, these platforms make it incredibly easy to schedule a thaw for whatever period of time you may need, a day, a week, as a legitimate entity reviews your credit. But by keeping this more permanently frozen, you again head off the bad actors before they can even get started.

Now, as you're probably gathering, this is all about prevention. If you make yourself a difficult target, you immediately put yourself in a stronger position. So build your moat, put your protections in place, for 10 to 15 minutes of work today you'll save yourself pounds of headache and heartache later. Thanks for joining me, everyone. Until next month.