HOW TO
SECURE YOUR DIGITAL LIFE
With
demonetisation becoming a reality, it is time we learnt to take control of our
digital lives
YOUR PHONE, tablet and
laptop know more about your life than you ever will. To understand that better
do a small experiment. Do a quick scroll through all your pictures starting
with the oldest ones; now do a search of all your private emails with the word
‘important’ and check their content, check how many passwords, ATM pins, online
transaction codes and other such info you’ve jotted down as notes on your
phone. Shocked? Well, it constitutes just one per cent of all the pieces that
make up your digital life.
Now think of all that
information freely available to unknown people. People who could suck all that
away from you, lock down your phone or computer making it inaccessible to you,
threaten you with publicly exposing all that information and finally demanding
money to open your device again for you. Sounds far fetched? Well, it’s time to
wake up to the reality of digital crime and making sure it doesn’t happen to
you.
COVER
UP
That webcam on your
laptop and the one on your Smart TV, needs a small medical procedure. Take a
piece of opaque tape (that leaves no residue) and stick it on the camera.
Logging into your laptop camera without your knowledge and capturing your
images and video is becoming very common and in the hacker world is known as
‘baby step 1’.
SILLY
BILLY
Despite warnings pouring
in for years, people still use passwords for convenience and not security. The
most common password in the world continues to be the 8 letter ‘password’!
Using your dog’s name followed by ‘123456’ or your child’s name followed by
‘qwerty’ are as bad. Using password managers may seem like a good idea but
isn’t. Here’s what you do. When you make up your password think of a vague
object around you followed by a random series of numbers or the lyrics of a
song followed by a number. Then write it down and put in a safe place. Change
passwords once a fortnight and actually do it this time.
ENCRYPT
IT ALL
If you only use WhatsApp,
iMessage or Signal for messaging, you’re good as they’ve pretty much encrypted
it all. If you use other messaging systems, then it’s time to enable encryption
there. Facebook messenger, Allo and a few others need encryption to be turned
on, so do it right away. If you use something that doesn’t have encryption as
an option, get off it now!
DOUBLE
DOWN
Two-step authentication
may well be the greatest saviour known to digital mankind. It’s when you login,
enter a password and the service sends a instantly generated second code to
your phone. Almost every good email service like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook has
it. Almost any digital service you use that has important personal information
has it too, all you need to do is to enable it.
BULLETPROOF
BROWSING
Nope, it’s not the
incognito mode in Chrome and nope I’m not asking you to switch to Tor (the
onion router). While Tor may well be the final solution to anonymous browsing,
it’s not a very good user experience right now. The simplest way to achieve
safety in browsing is to use a browser plug in called HTTPS everywhere. It’s
the best way to encrypt most of what you do on the web and also thwarts
hacking. Look it up, it’s available for almost all the browsers.
AND
FINALLY...
The last part of this is
a combination of a few things. Make sure that your Wi-Fi router at home has
double protection. A strong password for accessing the router itself as well as
the modem and an even more strong password for accessing the Wi-Fi signal. Close
to 99 per cent of all household routers have the default password ‘admin’ and
that makes it really easy for anyone to access all your settings. And finally
encrypt the hard-drive of your computer. Both MacOS and Windows have it built
in as an simple option. Do it now!
Most of these steps need
to be done just once and most of the follow-ups don’t need any significant time
and effort. The payoff is massive! Unless you want all your devices locked down
by some kid called iownyounow, it’s time to take your digital safety into your
own hands.
·
Rajiv Makhni is managing editor, Technology,
NDTV, and the anchor of Gadget Guru, Cell Guru and Newsnet 3 Rajiv Makhni
HTBR27NOV16
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