How To Keep your Online Accounts Safe and Secure

If you’ve just started an Internet business, or love being online for long hours, you’ll have to keep track of lots of different accounts on many websites. They might be social networking sites, instant messengers, forums, membership sites, or resources sites. Managing all these online accounts can be very difficult unless you possess a very sharp memory. You should never register all your online accounts with the same username or password. This is one of the best ways to keep your online accounts safe because if anybody finds out your login or password, they can hijack most of your online accounts. You should use different login and password for each of your account.

How to create a safe password?

You should use random characters for your passwords, but if you are unable to remember them, you can use password manager. It is not a good idea to let your browser remember all your passwords because hackers can hack your OS and get your usernames and passwords. Aside from that, if something worse happens to your PC, you can lose them forever.

Use password managers 

You can use password managers as they are not only safe, but can also help you in coming up with random passwords for use, and will remember them for future use. Best of all, they are safe, as all your data is encrypted and even if some hacker is able to log into your computer, they won’t be able to access your confidential data. You can also make a file with all your passwords, and store it elsewhere for safety. Some password managers even allow users to synchronize their data with their secure online servers. This helps you in accessing your passwords even when you are working on a different computer. In any case, you should avoid writing your usernames and password somewhere on paper. This can be risky because anybody can read the information if you fail to keep it safely. One Password manager I can recommend is Roboform, there are several others that are equally as good

Beware of phishing scams!

There are many websites on the Internet that have been made to steal personal information and data stored on computers. This is done using cookies and viruses. Some sites are designed exactly like other famous websites where you have accounts. For instance, PayPal constantly reminds its users that it never asks for usernames and passwords from its users. Yet, you may sometimes get emails that appears to have been sent by PayPal, which says that your account may have been compromised and that you should immediately change your password by clicking on the link and log into your PayPal account. This is called phishing scam that is designed by a con to get your personal details.

You should never share any of your personal information on any site that you are not sure of. Although most of the websites are run by hardworking and honest people, but you are not sure of the ways they handle your personal information. Therefore, if you don’t know much about them, and how they will handle your personal details, you should not share any with them. When searching for some products, services or information, use only one search engine, such as Google. If Google finds any dubious website, it will warn you beforehand on its search result page. Lastly, you should never respond to strange emails that come from sources you do not know. You should never click on links in these emails.

Tags: Internet Account Safety, Internet Account Security, Online Account Safety, Online Account Security

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com