Through the pandemic there has been a lot of extra fraud happening. As your IT partner, here are 3 easy things you can do to help reduce the chances of you getting hacked and have fraud committed against you!
Tip #1 MFA and 2FA.
First and foremost, let's talk about Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) or also known as Two-factor Authentication (2FA). These are an electronic authentication method where a user is given access to a website or application only after providing two or more verification factors. There are many different forms of MFA. Some examples are typing in a username and password and getting sent a notification to your cell phone, or receiving a text message that contains a code, or being asked to put in a 6-digit number that changes every few seconds. These are all ways to successfully authenticate yourself when accessing the website or application.
I know you might think that this method is annoying, adds a bunch of extra time and is a pain in the neck to just login to a website/application... But the level of security this provides is significant! Having this second piece of authentication security will deny any potential hacker who may attempt to commit fraud against you because they will not have that important second piece of authentication to try to log in after trying your username and password.
We highly recommend using this method and installing it on every single service that allows it. There are tons of different MFA applications available on your smart phone, whether that be an Android or iPhone. One of our favorites here at Skycomp is Microsoft's Authenticator App, as it backs up all that data to your OneDrive account.
Tip #2 Password Manager.
The second tip we have that not a lot of people think about is a password manager! There are a lot of options out there for this one. For example, Google Chrome has a basic one built into the web browser. There is also LastPass, KeepKey and many other services available on the market.
When using the same password for everything it makes you very vulnerable to being hacked or have fraud committed against you. This is where the password manager comes in. It allows you to have unique passwords for every site and you don’t need to remember them! That way if one site gets hacked it won’t jeopardize all your other accounts because they all have different passwords.
All you need to remember is one strong master password and 2FA to get into your password manager, after that all your generated unique passwords will be stored safely.
Tip #3 Generating a strong password that is easy to remember.
Like we talked about, there will be 1 or 2 passwords you'll need to remember. Last year we did an entire video on how to come up with a strong, yet easy password to remember, and if you want check that out click here. In essence, you create a sentence in your mind, then you take keywords out of that sentence and build your password around that. It becomes very hard for a computer to guess but very easy for a human like us to remember!
Those were our 3 helpful tips for preventing fraud and how you can increase your security!