There are many actions you can take to ensure that your personal information or data does not end up in the wrong hands, however, a lot of them require a broad understanding of online or cybersecurity.

Here are 5 easy and practical actions you can take if you are worried about your online privacy (don’t worry, you don’t need to be a cybersecurity geek for this one).

Update all your phone and computer applications

When you receive a notification of an application or software update on any of your devices, make it a habit to always attend to this immediately. Updates generally include something known as security patches and their role is to close any “holes” that may lead to anyone gaining unauthorized access to your device or data.

Use strong passwords

A great password is one that is easy for you to remember but difficult for anyone to guess. The more complex the password is the harder it will be to crack. A tip for creating such a password that you will be able to easily remember is using a passphrase that makes sense to you, so your password could be something like “I love pineapples on my pizza!”.
To make your password even more complex you can also consider using a mix of upper case and lowercase characters as well as numbers and symbols such as “&” or “!” in your password.

Practice safe browsing

You wouldn’t visit a dangerous neighbourhood if you could avoid doing so in the real world, so why would you visit dangerous areas of the online world? Cyber thieves normally use “dodgy” content as bait, they know very well that many users are tempted by such content and are likely to let their guard when engaging with such.
One wrong click on a dubious website could result in you exposing your personal data to cyber attackers or hackers. Avoid visiting unsecured or suspicious websites at all costs when browsing the internet.

Practice good password management

Because we normally have multiple online accounts, we don’t want to lose access to any of them so we usually find it easier to re-use the same password on all our different accounts. The danger that comes with this is that if an attacker manages to gain access to one of your online accounts they will be able to access every other online account of yours that uses that same password, so it is very important that you avoid reusing the same password for more than one online account.

You can make use of a good password manager such as Dashlane or Lastpass. Most devices also come with built-in password managers which can be very effective in helping you manage different passwords.

Follow these easy steps and you will be able to experience pure internet joy without any worries. Please visit our help centre https://help.afrihost.com/topic/security for more topics on security.