4.1 Protecting Personal Information…
Nine times out of 10, when you are signing up for an email account, social network, or a plethora of other websites on the World Wide Web, you will be asked the inevitable – what is your date of birth?Advancing personal questions even more, sometimes you will be asked things like your full name (obviously), your location or birth place (sometimes for the security question), hobbies and any other random questions.
Whilst most of these are standard procedures and you shouldn’t give them a second thought, maybe you actually should think about it carefully.
What are you signing up to? If it is for your email account, keep in mind that you may need to know the information you’re providing.
For instance Sometimes when resetting or recovering your password, you may need to enter your birthday (or the birth date you chose for your account). Because of this, you need to realise that if you sign up anywhere on the web or communicate your birthday anywhere on the web, publicly or not, people might be able to see that information.
As mentioned previously throughout this course, details such as the following are not uncommon to be asked during the registration process – or even in the case of social networks and personal connection sites – and they can quite often also be related to account security related questions, which translates to headaches and danger for you, or your account (in some cases).
Commonly requested details (often used for account security, in other places):- What is your date of birth?
- What is your mother’s maiden name?
- What is your favourite colour?
- What is your favourite food?
- In which city were you born?
- What street did you grow up in?
- What school did you attend for X grades?
- What was the make of your first car?
- And the list goes on
Whilst you may scoff at the idea that anybody could guess these, or be able to decipher this information and use it to access your account, you’d be even more astounded at how often it really does occur.
By process of elimination, it’s not out of line to see how a “hacker” could use the internet to figure out what school you went to in first grade, or even what street you grew up in. Details, such as your mother’s maiden name, are not hard to uncover, when using the internet craftily to find bits of information.
These details can frequently be dug up somewhere on the web, somehow. Furthermore, they can often be guessed by just looking up common lists (as in the case of the make of a car). Maybe not in every individual person’s case, but it’s better to be safe, rather than sorry.
Putting in a little effort and pre-emptive thinking towards both current and future account creation and security management techniques, can go a long way.
Social Media Security
4.2 Google+ (And Other Social Media) Security…
If you’re using GMail (Google Mail) as your email service provider, then you will have a Google+ account automatically set up for you, from the get go.This happens, regardless of whether you wanted it to happen, or not.
Guess what? Google+ shares a range of information about you, which you may have filled in or set up over time.
If you’re starting to panic now, don’t worry just yet. You aren’t fully in the danger zone yet.
What you should do is venture out to Google+ and then follow these steps, after you have logged in with your main Gmail account.- Click on the “Home” button, towards the upper left corner of the page and select “Settings” from the list that drops down.
- From the window that displays, scroll down to the “Profile” section.
- Most of these options are self-explanatory, but if you want to uncheck certain ones, you can follow this image.
- Next, you want to change the actual basic information shared on your profile. So head back to the Google+ home page and follow these steps again, after you’ve logged in.
- In the top left corner, click the drop-down menu that reads Home > and click Profile.
- Below your cover photo, click About > scroll to the box you want to edit.
- In the lower left corner of the box, click Edit.
When you edit your information, use the drop-down menu on the right, to decide who sees your information.- If you make changes, click Save in the bottom right corner.
Following this set of steps, should allow you to completely pick and choose what information is shared about you and exactly what information you have out there, floating around on the web via your Google+ profile. And believe it or not, Google+ definitely holds a lot of weight in search results.
Keeping with the process of making your profile private, you can also venture out to websites like Facebook and such. Open the “Privacy” settings and make sure that the information you’re sharing is the information that you’re actually comfortable with sharing with the public (or even your friends on that network).
Make it a point to periodically check these settings, both on your email (Gmail) account and on the many social media and networking websites.
Sometimes, these networks may update policies and push out other updates that mess with the privacy settings (especially on Facebook).
4.3 Allowing Apps To Access Your (Email) Account(s)…
Nowadays, it’s really common for websites to simplify the registration process for their actual site or community.Because of this, you will often be presented with the option to “sign up” or “log in”, using various different popular social networks and accounts. This could include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail – and so on.
This entire process is most often referred to as allowing third party app access, to your account.
This generally isn’t much of an issue or concern. However, you need to be aware of the information that you’re sharing with these networks, when you initially sign up or log in to the site. You can almost always choose the exact information you’re sharing with these sites (by selecting, or deselecting little bubbles).
In the end, you will usually have to share something like your email address, but that’s not really much of an issue. If it is, you can always just sign up with a throwaway email address, or a separate email account all together.
4.4 Third-party app
Something that you should be aware of is the “third-party app” that is accessing your information.Use the same precautions for this type of thing, as you would with sharing your personal email. Don’t use this method or share your details with a suspicious looking site, or a suspicious looking third party app – especially if it seems to be asking for a lot of information during the sign up/integration process.
As a whole, you don’t really have to be too concerned about allowing these third party apps to have access, or connect, to your email account, or other social media account. It’s usually just to extract the email and allow you to bypass the registration process of filling out the forms.
Just be sure to emphasise caution with the sign up/connection process, just as you would with sharing any personal information, or your email account, in any other situation.
4.5 Regular / Routine Maintenance And Upkeep…
There is a chance you’ve actually encountered a similar situation to which the following information pertains.Some email service providers, social media websites and various other networks, will often “force” you to change your password, or other details related to your account, every few months. Sometimes, this may even happen as a result of a security breach, or just a security update within the network.
This may seem like a hassle and you run the possibility of forgetting your newly chosen password, if you do change it. However, this is an excellent method to ensure that your account(s) always stay secure.
This is important, because not all “hackers” and security breaches take action on the accounts that they gain access to, immediately.
4.6 Security breach
In the event that a security breach may have leaked your password (amongst hundreds or even thousands of others), the receiver of said password may try and access your account, months, or even years down the road.If you’ve already changed your password, they are fresh out of luck and locked out in the cold.
Some people come up with an algorithm for creating a unique password that you can always remember, which somehow relates to the date, or something similar. By doing a Google search for “Password creation methods”, or “password creation algorithms”, you can find plenty of information on this topic.
When it really comes down to it, you just need to keep up to date with the security aspects of not just your email account(s), but also any other important accounts that, if compromised, could lead to a headache and lots of panic.
It has previously been mentioned about turning on mobile notifications and multi-step authentication for your account(s) – and this is an excellent way to get live updates about potential security threats towards your account(s).
If you haven’t done so already, make sure that you at least look into the feature, to see if your service provider supports it.
Making it a habit to stay up to date and get into a routine of checking privacy settings, login history and other security factors, will allow the overall process to become almost second nature to you. This means always having a secure network of accounts, whether related to email, business, or anything else.
Improving Other Account Security
4.7 Preparing Other Important Accounts And Improving Their Overall Level Of Security…
After going through the majority of this course, it is almost a given that you’ve been considering the security on other fronts.By other fronts, we are referring to accounts related to payments (PayPal, Banks, Credit Cards), social media accounts, business accounts and any other account that may be connected to valuable information.
There is good news and bad news here though.
4.8 The good news
The good news is that everything you’ve learned and can apply in this course can easily be put into action, for any other account found on the web.All of this security mumbo-jumbo isn’t just exclusive to email accounts. As a matter of fact, you’re more likely to run into far more (and higher) levels of security, when dealing with payment based accounts, such as banks – and so on.
You can apply the password techniques, account security methods and all of the additional security levels, such as mobile phone, 2-step authentication and even on the go (mobile) alerts, to any website out there that supports any of these features.
4.9 The bad news
The bad news is that some websites might not have as much, or as many, factors of security, or even as much emphasis on security as they should.To combat this, you can utilise every feature that is available to you, whilst also always being certain that you have an extremely strong password and even stronger account security question (and answer).
Another thing that almost all websites support, is the backup email address. You should take the time to visit many of the websites and networks that you frequently use and check to see if they have an emergency/recovery email address feature – or even if they have a feature to retrieve your account, via (mobile) telephone number.
If it is an important account to you that contains or links to pertinent valuable information, then make it a habit of routinely checking up on the account’s health and status. This can be as simple as logging in, checking past login activity (if supported) and even changing your password regularly.
Keeping a close watch over accounts and above all, ensuring that your security measures are the best they can be, will allow you to not only significantly prevent the chance of a security threat, but also allow you to be prepared, in the event that something does happen.
Worksheet
Estimated Time: 30 minutesNow it is time to put what you have learnt in Module 4 to the test. Work your way through this worksheet and do your best to fully participate in every activity set.
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