Category: Internet Security

File sharing is the process in which digital media is shared among devices. The art of file sharing is not a new thing as it began in 1967 when Alan Shugart invented the floppy disk. This technology has evolved over the years from people being able to share a single file to multiple ones by one click of a button.

Currently, there are no limits on the number of files that you can share. The process involved is both simple and straightforward.

Making Use of Safe Technological Tools

In recent years, there have been advancements in technology that now allows you to zip files and share them. There are companies that pioneer in the provision of tools for compressing, zipping, and achieving files. The beauty of using such tools is that they will reduce the size of the document without tampering with the format and appearance. They also have an option to input security measures so that files can only be accessed by authorized people alone.

But, what are the benefits of file sharing? When done safely, it:

• It is affordable which allows teams to have access to relevant information at a low cost.
• The process is efficient as the technology available allows you to share files promptly.
• Based on the service that you are using, files shared can be accessed from any location.
• It fosters collaboration especially if you are using cloud computing that allows users to edit the information online.

Currently, there are numerous ways in which you could share files safely.  It’s simply one more way to protect you, your computer and your family online.

Below are 10 tips on how to share files safely and efficiently:

1. Avoid emails

Emails may be convenient but they are not the best when sharing documents with confidential information. These platforms are prone to hacking which could result in confidential files landing in the hands of authorized personnel.

2. Update your security software

Often people forget to update their software which leaves them vulnerable. Hackers know this and tend to take advantage of systems that are not updated.

3. Encrypt with passwords

Technology has made it possible for people to incorporate passwords on files that they do want people with prying eyes to see. To ensure that a document is not easily accessible, you need to encrypt it with a complicated password that has upper and lower cases as well as symbols and numbers. When you leverage encryption, you will significantly reduce the penetrating power of various cyberattacks.

4. Change passwords often

It is recommended that you change your passwords often preferably every month. Because it can be difficult to remember to make these changes, you need to note down the dates when passwords need to be changed.

5. Use secure connection

Remote workers are among the people who are fond of sharing information among themselves. Suppose you work away from the office, you need to ensure that your connection is secure before sharing any files. Be extra careful if you are using a public WiFi.

6. Refrain from suspicious downloads

The rule is that whenever you are sharing files using digital platforms is that you never download files that you do not trust. Hackers can incorporate viruses, spyware, and adware on files to gain access to your system. Thus, you should never open downloads that you do not trust.

7. Double-check inbox emails

Working from home will have you receiving a ton of emails from various stakeholders, customers, and colleagues. It is always safe to check the sender of the email several times before opening any attachments that come with it. Sometimes a sender may appear legitimate, your job is to look keenly so that you protect your files and digital devices.

8. Utilize safe file-sharing programs

There exist programs that you can use to share files with colleagues. Among them are Enigmail., pCloud, Resilio., SpiderOak., and Signal. These programs should have features such as web editing, remote file access, and file locking as well as mobile access.

9. Refrain from clicking links

Do not make it a habit of clicking links that come with files that you receive. If you are in doubt, you should hover around the link a couple of times before clicking it. When your gut tells you that you should click a link, you need to listen to it.

10. Avoid USB drives

Flash disks and external hard drives are not the best tools to share files with them. Given their size, they are bound to get lost and are easy to steal as well. Suppose, they fall in the wrong hands, you lose valuable data.

Conclusion

File sharing is one of the most important technologies we have. It enables teams to work together onsite and remotely. However, this process is prone to the risk of hacking hence the need to share files securely.

Got a kid that loves to game? Or maybe you are an avid gamer yourself. Have you thought much about gamer security? There has been plenty written about protecting your home computer with an anti-virus program, but what about increased performance while gaming?

A big problem arises when the anti-virus is turned off completely because it interferes with the online gaming experience.  McAfee Gamer Security solves the debate within families regarding how much security one can compromise in order to maintain computer performance while playing.  McAfee created Gamer Security as a complete gamer software solution.  Security + Performance.

This gamer security software was not designed to merely prevent a decrease in gaming performance while staying protected online, the software boasts a faster, more quiet, and safer gaming experience thanks to cutting edge performance enhancing technologies.

Game Boost Engine

Some anti-virus programs have long had a problem with bogging down computers while you are trying to other tasks.  Gaming is more than a task.  It’s be huge drain on an operating system and requires a fast internet connection.  It also craves every ounce of CPU and RAM it can squeeze out of your operating system.  The McAfee Gamer Security program works to get more performance out of your operating system and ensures your games stay prioritized over applications running in the background.

All of this increased speed happens without you having to turn off the anti-virus program that is part of the software.  Slowdowns are bound to happen so this gamer software promises to resolve those slowdowns quickly so your game is not held back from working properly.  This is especially important when playing online with a team.

• Learn pro PUBG tips and tricks for new and returning players.
• Or discover how to get better aim legends.

App Manager

The app manager within McAfee Gamer Security gives you control to kill or de-prioritize resource heavy apps.  While maintaining operating system performance, the software automatically saves stats from your last 5 game sessions which you can look at later.  Settings are customizable, providing intuitive control over system optimization and pop-up suppression is readily available. You can also tweak the software’s multiple settings as desired.

McAfee Gamer Security helps you achieve a smoother overall experience on your PC, from everyday performance gains thanks to the low impact MicroAV engine to the FPS stability. This also results in smoother game play delivered by their Game Boost technology. 

Pricing

Some users may not like the annual price tag on this software.  Not that it’s unusually priced above other anti-virus type programs, but the annual subscription for Game Security is only for one computer.  This may not be a problem as there may only be one gamer in the household in need of online protection, while increasing speed and customizable performance.

Gamer Online Protection with Enhanced Performance

Not to be infused with parental control software that filters content, McAfee Gamer Security is a software download that allows gamers to enhance their computer performance while stay protected with anti-virus protection.  It’s a vital tool in to help players engage safety with fellow gamers.

Will it work on your computer?  If you download the software and are having issues you may request a full refund by contacting McAfee Customer Support within 30 days of initial purchase.

Gamer Security System Requirements

To operate the Gamer Security software you must have Microsoft Windows 10 version 1809 (Oct 2018 update) or later.  If you already have Windows 10 and are unsure of what version is running simply update to the latest version.  It’s a good idea anyway to turn on automotive updates for Windows to ensure your systems is always secure.  The hardware needed on your computer is 2 GB RAM | 500 MB free drive space | 1 GHz Processor.  A high-speed internet connection is recommended.

How is it faster? When McAfee did tests of their gamer security software compared to both traditional and built-in AV they found:

• A faster boot.
• Faster shutdown.
• Faster standby suspend.
• Faster suspend to hibernate.
• Learn more

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Safe Online Game Search

Even though WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Snapchat among others are the go-to social media platforms for instant communications, we still heavily rely on emails even in 2020. So why does there seem to be little focus on ways to protect our email privacy?

Afterall, we use emails to share our financial information with our accountants, manage online money transfer services like PayPal, and even use it to create all of our social media accounts. In a sense, our personal lives are linked to our email addresses.

Despite being such a major part of our life and the fact that approximately 320 billion people are using it, email remains as one of the least secure means of communication. Believe it or not, email technology is still based on protocols that can’t cope up with modern online security threats.

Getting your email hacked might not seem like a big deal for kids, but for adults, it can be an absolute nightmare.

Keeping this in mind, in today’s informative blog post, I’m going to talk about why email privacy is so important, share with you some real-world email hacking case studies, and also tell you 9 proven tips to enhance your email privacy.

Why Email Privacy Matters?

Think about it for a second, everything you do online is connected to your email address. Whether it be online banking or something as simple as signing up for any online service, you’ll have to provide an email address to get started. Once you get registered, you usually get your account details such as username and password emailed back to you.

If a hacker gains access to your emails, all hell can break loose. About 92% of malware is delivered through emails. That’s an alarming figure.

If a hacker gains access to your account, they can obtain sensitive information such as account credentials, personal information, and even steal your identity.

Now you must be thinking, how on earth can someone read my emails when no one knows my password?

Well, unlike the messages we send over WhatApp and other end-to-end encrypted messaging services, emails go through numerous servers before reaching their destination.

Whenever an email passes through an intermediary server, multiple copies of it are stored. While one server might be difficult to hack, others might not be. That’s how your emails get compromised.

Think I’m making this up?

Well, you can enter your email address on haveibeenpwned.com and check whether anyone has compromised your privacy.

Anyways, if you still have doubts, let’s check out some real-world use cases where people have actually lost a ton of money simply because their email addresses got hacked.

Real-World Email Hacking Cases

I’m going to share with you two actual cases that resulted in the loss of thousands of dollars simply because some hackers managed to gain access to the email accounts of unsuspected victims.

Case #1 – $47,500 Stolen From a Pensioner

A pensioner in Brisbane Australia bore a loss of $47,500 when he became a victim of an identity theft case. A hacker managed to hack into the victim’s account and send a series of convincing emails to the advisor managing his pension funds.

The hacker requested to deposit $90,000 to an overseas bank account as his daughter desperately needed money. The advisor got convinced and sent over a Pension Payment Request form telling the hacker that only $47,500 can be withdrawn.

The hacker filled in the form with all the details stolen from the client’s email account and told the adviser not to call him as he’s attending a funeral.

The advisor respected the client’s request thinking it was genuine and processed the withdrawal request right away. Till the real client could manage to explain that his email account got hacked a few days ago, the funds were already transferred to an offshore account.

Case #2 – Barely Dodged an Email Fraud of $260,000

Another financial adviser based in Australia was also targeted by a hacker, however, she managed to dodge a fraud of $260,000.

A hacker emailed her from her client’s email address that got hacked, requesting her to change the email address to a new one. The new email address only had one letter missing — “g”.

The hacker then sent an email from the new email account telling the advisor to deposit $260,000 in an offshore account because they wanted to buy some property. The email seemed totally legit, however, since the amount was quite substantial, the advisor wanted to talk to the client personally for authenticity reasons.

However, the real client was unreachable over the phone, and the transaction got delayed. In desperation, the hacker contacted the adviser via a phony contact number that was associated with the new bogus email address.

However, upon getting in contact, the adviser quickly figured out that the person on the phone was not the real customer judging from the accent, and refused to process the request.

9 Tips to Enhance Your Email Privacy

So by now, you must have an idea of how a hacker can take over your life if your email address gets compromised. But it’s not the end of the world. Now, we’re going to look at 9 proven easy tips to enhance the privacy of your email accounts.

Tip #1 – Use More Than One Email Address

You should never rely on just a single email account for work and personal use. Always use two different email accounts to segregate your work mailbox from your personal mailbox. This will ensure that you’re not putting all your eggs in the same basket.

If you want to take this strategy to another level, you can create different disposable email addresses when signing up for any service online. This way, you’ll never risk your personal information.

Tip #2 – Use Strong Passwords

Probably the most basic reason why most people lose their email accounts is that they use weak passwords. Passwords like your name followed by a sequence of numbers (John12345678) are really easy to crack.

With your password compromised, a hacker can freely go through your emails, piece your personal information together, and then wreak all sorts of havoc.

An easy solution to this problem is to use strong lengthy cryptic passwords. Use a lot of uppercase and lowercase letters along with numbers and special symbols to make your password uncrackable. A password like this: !.v[L2,m=nVhpPJ<:Ub<gQ5A, would be impossible to compromise.

Tip #3 – Don’t Share Your Email When You Don’t Have to

This seems pretty self-explanatory, however, you’re often going to find people linking their email addresses in their social media bios. We’re all guilty of it. Another mistake that we all make is that we tend to provide our real email address when signing up for services that don’t really require email confirmations.

By limiting where we share our email address, we can prevent hackers who are constantly on the lookout for new victims from compromising our email account’s privacy.

 Tip #4 – Enable Two-Factor authentication

In addition to using an insanely strong password, it’s often a good idea to use two-factor authentication (2FA). Two-factor authentication ensures that if your password gets compromised, an attacker will still be required to bypass the second layer of security.

Depending on which version of two-factor authentication your email client offers, an attacker will be required to either enter an email address on a secondary device, enter a pin received via SMS or answer a secret question for reinforced privacy.

Tip #5 – Never Email Personally-Identifying Information

Since emails are relatively easier to hack and compromise, you should never share any personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, phone numbers, date of birth, and other sensitive data. This will ensure that you’re not providing any information that can come back to haunt you in the future.  Another available resource where you can check if your data is exposed is from CyberNews and their data leak checker.   It covers the latest leaks from LinkedIn or Clubhouse, just to name two. 

Tip #6 – Use a Secure and Authentic Email Client

If you want to be completely sure that no will be able to read the contents of your emails, you’ll have to ditch mainstream email clients like Gmail for something that’s not generic and actually offers any privacy.

You can go for something like ProtonMail, who have their servers buried 1,000 meters underground in a Swiss bunker. Other noteworthy email clients include Posteo, Mailfence, and mailbox.org.

Tip #7 – Sign Out of Your Mailbox as Often as You Can

This might seem like a cumbersome process, but it can actually enhance the privacy of your email account. Signing out whenever you’re not using your email account can prevent remote hijackers from examining the contents of your mailbox.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you log out of your account every time you’re done emailing someone. Instead, sign out of your email account at the end of your work shift or before going to bed. Especially if you’re using someone else’s computer.

Tip #8 – Don’t Use Public Wi-Fi

No matter how tempting a free Wi-Fi connection might seem, you should never use one for any sensitive task. Hackers are infamous for setting up malicious hotspots to intercept people’s personal information.

So, if you log into your email account via a malicious Wi-Fi connection, a hacker can potentially take over your email account and steal your sensitive information. This is why you should always use only trusted networks or use a Proxy if connecting to public Wi-Fi is the last option available to you.

Tip #9 – Use a Recovery Email Address

The last and final tip I have for you is to always set up a recovery email address in case something goes wrong. This way, if someone manages to take over your account and exploits you, then you can simply change your password via the recovery backup email address and regain control of your email account.

Wrapping up!

So this wraps it up. I hope you now have an idea of why you should start taking the privacy of your email accounts seriously. If you religiously start following the 9 tips I shared with you in this blog post, you can greatly enhance the privacy of your email account.

After all, it all comes down to you. You’re the only one who can put in the effort to and safeguard the privacy of your email account. If you found this blog post informative, do consider sharing it with your friends and family.

Read more about how to protect your email privacy by preventing identity theft through phishing emails.  You can also make the internet more safe by reporting phishing.

Selecting an easy to remember password seems like a simple enough thing to do. But when it comes to protecting your online accounts, there are a few important things to consider before you lock in that special password that is all your own and unique to you.

Is your password secure enough? Are you using the same password across multiple accounts? What if someone hacks into a database and learns your password and email address?

Whether it be on social media, cloud backup or a password to your bank account, keeping track of passwords is a hassle. Still, passwords remain to be out first defense against an invasion of privacy that can affect our safety both on and offline. Until fingerprint technology or facial recognition becomes the norm, we all need to learn and develop good password management habits.

Learning Password Management at School

Password management can be an excellent point of discussion that is catered to students of any age that are already choosing their own passwords for their various social media accounts. Here are a few guidelines and tips that can also be used for parents at home, who in many cases are already helping their kids choose passwords for transparency at home and for online protection.

1. The importance of forming a strong password comes before anything else

Make sure your password contains capital letters, numbers, as well as special symbols. Also, do your best to make sure passwords are at least a certain length. These types of passwords may be difficult to remember immediately, so write them down and keep it on a piece of paper at home. Many online accounts save the password on your computer or smart phone app and it may be a while before you have to enter it in again.

If you fail to memorize your password and you didn’t write it down, you can create a new by clicking “forget password”, which will send a password resent link to your email.

2. The dangers of entering one’s password on a public computer

The problem with public computers is that you never know what might be lurking in the shadows. Unless you happen to be the administrator, which you probably aren’t. There might be all sorts of malware hidden in there, including the one that can spy on keystrokes.

Even assuming the computer is clean, there’s always a danger. After all, humans are on the forgetful side of the scale. In other words, your can easily forget to log out of your account and grant full control to the next random person who comes by. Not an ideal situation. Plus, you never know who’s standing behind your back when you enter your password in public.

When using your own phone or computer in a public place, be wary of logging into an account when connected to a public Wi-Fi that does not require users to identity themselves.

3. The problem of trading security for convenience and the reasons why it’s discouraged

Too many people fall into the convenience trap. They start reusing the same password across different websites for the sake of keeping things easy to remember. An additional way to increase security is to learn more about the importance of using a password manager. Thanks to its functionality, users keep the convenience of not having to remember too much. They enable creating different passwords for each account while only having to memorize the master password to access the rest.

Enhance your password security by doing the following:

• Make your passwords long, unique, and complex.
• Don’t use the same password on multiple platforms.
• Use a Password Manager to store all your passwords. This will mean you to only remember one password to access all of your other passwords.

Learning Password Management at Home

Often, kids can be more tech-savvy than their parents. But even as a parent you can take the initiative to protect your family with security basics, and beyond, that are often overlooked by those who feel they are already up-to-date on the latest in online safety.

Let’s also not forget that technology is always evolving. Hackers are continually coming up with new ways to gain unlawful access to private databases and accounts. What was good practice for protecting privacy two years ago may not be the best way to go about it today.

1. Remote data wiping technology

Even if you do everything right cybersecurity-wise, what’s stopping you from misplacing or losing your device? Many people tend to be forgetful. So, if you’re not sure where your phone is (especially if you suspect someone has snatched it right out of your pocket), deleting your data before it gets into the wrong hands is a wise course of action. Remote data wiping technology is an insurance policy in this regard.

If you have important information you want to save, you’ll want to set up some sort of online back-up to a cloud account. This way you can easily restore your device if you wipe it clean. Of course, make sure your online back-up account also has a strong password.

2. Two-factor authentication

Malware programs can steal your passwords right from under your nose. With two-factor authentication you can greatly increase protection of your accounts. Two-factor authentication asks anyone logging in to perform an extra step (like entering a PIN from a confirmation SMS) before granting access an account. It can restrict access in case of a data breach or stolen password.

3. Password variations that use the same core are a terrible idea

Never underestimate the creative mind of a hacker. If they can get close to guessing your second password based on another, it won’t take long before they succeed. Randomly generated passwords are a much better idea than different variations of the same password.

4. Personally identifiable information is a no-no

Let’s put it this way. The street where you live, as well as your birthday, are all facts that can be available to anyone. Anyone willing to go to great lengths to get them, that is. Therefore, you should avoid constructing passwords around publicly identifiable information.

5. The importance of changing your passwords often

Changing your passwords regularly is a good cybersecurity practice. But it also tends to be forgotten, especially when many accounts do not require changing your password regularly. Again, with a password manager, having to remember a whole new batch of passwords becomes a non-issue.

No matter your age or expertise, the creation of a good strong password is often taken for granted. Whether it’s a social media account, a website for online shopping, your online banking access – or an app on your phone, each one of your accounts is an online profile of you that’s worth protecting in as many ways that are available.

If you think a password you have used online has been compromised, it may be due to clicking a link in a phishing email.  Learn what you can do to protect yourself as well as how to report phishing when it happens to you.