With Memorial Day freshly behind us, summer has started. We have vacations and get-togethers on the horizon. Let’s make sure everyone remains cyber safe.
Posting your plans in advance
Be cautious posting your plans to be away from home, even for a short period of time, in line. There are criminals who will look at your absence as an opportunity to go shopping in your home. They may not be taking only physical items. Sometimes they will take information they find in your home for later use. This information may come from your bills or credit/bank account statements. They may look for this information on your computers and other devices or from your snail mail.
Posting vacation pictures, even after the fact
This might seem a little odd, but hear me out. You go on a fabulous vacation with your family to a fantastic location. You’ve posted pictures on all your social media and changed your phone and computer backgrounds to the best picture from the trip. A short time later you are updating the security challenge questions for a financial institution. You pick the question “What is your favorite place to visit?” and your answer is the location of your recent vacation.
This also presents an opportunity for social engineering. Along with other information that is posted on social media, it is possible to put enough together to impersonate someone online or outright steal someone’s identity.
When you are away from home, have your mail and trash picked up regularly. Letting your mail pile up in the mailbox or on your porch is a tempting target for credit and identity thieves. I suggest using either the Post Office’s mail-hold service or asking a neighbor to pick up your mail and hold it for you. The mail pick-up may seem obvious and many of us are used to doing this, but you should include the trash in this too. The reason is that when you have discarded mail in your trashcan it provides an opportunity for someone to steal your information.
When you are away from home, be careful what WiFi you join.
Public wifi is an open invitation for cyber thieves to gather information from people’s online activity. Whatever people do on the public wifi is interceptable. The information can be gathered in transmission and saved for later use. This is true whether the wifi is in a coffee shop, airport, airplane, school, or other open space. There are a couple of options for how to manage this. First, you can be very intentional about which WiFi services you use. If it is a free, but managed network where there is a password, it is more likely to be a safe network to join. Another option is to take your own device with you. Then you don’t have to worry about who you are sharing the public network with. You do need to make sure that you protect your portable wifi with a strong password though.
Comentarios