How to protect yourself online?

The Internet is a crucial aspect of our life. We work online, shop online, study online, meet people, and so on. There can be plenty of other examples. With this popularity, also the number of malicious activities grew. This is of utmost importance to protect yourself online and avoid being tricked to disseminate any regrettable information. Nefarious actors may try to gain control over your account, get access to your sensitive information, and bank account, and take over your identity. There can be plenty of reasons.

How to detect a suspicious or insecure situation online?

Often you can detect a suspicious situation when you identify a sense of urgency. When you feel you have been forced to react immediately or you feel that you lose common sense. This is done to ensure that you feel like you do not have time to think and you cannot make a conscious decision.

In most cases, you do have time, and you should use it. Take a deep breath and think. In life, the number of free things is close to zero. You nearly always have to pay. With malicious actions, most certainly you pay unwillingly, with your unaware consent. When you see the state of urgency required in decision-making, try to learn a habit to be called in such cases to take over a situation. Just to ensure that you will not be steered in the direction where an attacker wants you to go. You need to regain control of your reactions.

Remember even the most legitimate sources can be used for bad things.

If anything, even coming from a reliable or known source, seems suspicious to you always validate it. There can be plenty of various situations. E.g. your bank can ask you to dictate your account credentials over a phone. It should trigger an alert in your head. Why bank needs an alert from you? You can end a conversation and call the bank directly to clarify a such situation or to report an attempt of nefarious activity.

You can receive a link in an email asking you to take immediate action of changing your password. However, you may be redirected to an original legitimate website, but an evil copy of your service website. It may remarkably resemble the proper website. Still, the name of the address may slightly differ. It can contain a typo or can have a substitution of letters, which looks similar at first glance. Just be vigilant to always validate the source of a message.

Protect yourself against suspicious phone calls

If you receive a phone call that seems questionable do not do any activities that you are asked for. First hang up and try to contact an institution, that supposedly called you. Try to confirm or clarify the situation that has just occurred to ensure if it was legitimate activity. In case no one knows about this, no such person works, or someone impersonated a staff of this institution, then you can report a potentially risky situation.

It is hard to define every potential request or order that you may receive over a phone call. But definitely, you should search for any urgency patterns and any attempt to obtain any private or sensitive information.

Protect yourself against suspicious Emails

With an email always check where it comes from and check if it is a legitimate source. Check the domain, if it is a real one. Also, check how a person greets you. Whether it is a general greeting or more personal. Verify if there are no typos or grammar mistakes. Quite often suspicious emails contain a few errors. Do not open any attachments from unknown senders, if you haven’t confirmed the source. If you have any links or buttons, do not click them. First, verify where a link is redirecting you. You can e.g. copy the link and paste it into notepad to see a real path.

Protect yourself against suspicious text Messages

With a text message, similarly to email, first of all, check the sender. Here, what you can do is see whether you know the number or not. Based on whether you know it or not, you can decide if you can follow any link attached or not. The same applies to any request. E.g. you may be asked to transfer a missing fee, otherwise, your ordered item won’t be delivered. This may seem not a high amount, but still, you may be using a link to a payment website that is malicious and gain access to your account.

Protect yourself against suspicious Social Media messages

A social media situation with attachments and links is similar to email. Any message source should be checked. However, someone could have hacked into your friend’s account. Unfortunately, this happens quite often. How to know, if it is not real communication from your friend? There is no one straight way, but what you can do is to check the profile and see if this person hasn’t posted anything suspicious about the account being taken over (especially when a message is quite old). Second, if the information sent by a friend looks like something that this person will write to you. This can be hardly reliable if you had no contact over years and now this person needs something urgently. The last thing maybe that his person has something personal or try to play with your feelings, insecurities or compromising situations e.g. your photos were shared act upon it.

Stay safe online

Always be cautious about any urgent actions that are expected from you. If you feel that someone enforces pressure on you to do anything immediately, there is a great deal that this is not legitimate. Try to anchor it in your mind and try to steer your actions into not falling for an order, but to take a moment for a break to be able to think clearly.

Sharpen your instincts

Oddly enough, even though you do not feel comfortable with technology, you still have a hunch. It may be related to something not feeling or being or looking right. Try to learn to trust your instincts. It doesn’t mean they may protect you against threats in disguise, but it may at least eliminate some potential malicious situations, and strengthen your abilities to detect risky cases faster or more precisely.

You cannot enter the same river twice. However, you may learn to recognize patterns. Also, you may inhibit the habits or some kind of routine that needs to be verified. E.g. not clicking links being sent to your emails, or not opening attachments without verifying the source first.

Additional things maybe not to provide any credentials online unless you are completely sure this is the legitimate website, tool, service, and so on. The same applies via phone or any other means. Treat your sensitive information vigilantly and do not disseminate them.