How to avoid getting hacked
APC’s editor reveals his top tips for staying digitally secure.
Protecting yourself in today’s digital world is as much about knowing what not to do as it is about having your devices and apps updated and patched. But changing behaviour is more difficult than just installing a security suite on your PC. And sadly, cybercrime isn’t going anywhere — we’ve seen steady increases in criminal activity in the digital world every year since the early ‘90s.
So what should you do? Well, that’s what this month’s cover story is for — and it’ll teach you how to lock down almost all your devices and services to ensure both your security and privacy... well, as much as is possible in today’s age when even government security agencies are the subject of major hacks. But even though there’s no such thing as being bulletproof in the age of the cloud, you can be nearly so.
Beyond securing your own gear, though, there are threats you can’t easily protect against — all the online services we’re constantly signing up for can also be at risk. There’s not much you can do to actively shield yourself against third-parties getting hacked, but you can check to see if any of the services you’ve signed up to have been compromised. Head to the excellent haveibeenpwned.com and you can choose to enter either a password or an email address to see if either of them can be found on publicly-available lists of exposed user databases. We’d suggest just entering your email address, rather than any passwords. You might be surprised by the results — two of my accounts are on there, and (not to blow my own whistle), you know, if the editor of APC can get inadvertently hacked, anyone can.
Online services and sites being hacked is the key reason as to why you shouldn’t ever re-use the same password. If just one of those companies’ user databases is hacked and you’ve been using the same password elsewhere, then you could find that cybercriminals have taken over not just that account, but a whole bunch of others, too.
My last bit of advice, then, is to use a password manager — I’m a fan of LastPass, which went free back in 2015, so there’s really no reason not to use it. And you can find a quick guide to getting started with it on pages 52–53 of this issue.